Article · Wikipedia archive · Last revised Jun 13, 2026

Collaborative Drug Discovery

Collaborative Drug Discovery (CDD) is a software company founded in 2004 as a spin-out of Eli Lilly by Barry Bunin, PhD. CDD utilizes a web-based database solution for managing drug discovery data, primarily through the CDD Vault product which is focused around small molecules and associated bio-assay data. In 2021, CDD launched its first commercial data offering, PharmaKB, formerly BioHarmony, as The Pharma KnowledgeBase, which is centered around pharma company, drug, and disease information for research, business intelligence, and investors.

Last revised
Jun 13, 2026
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≈ 6 min
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Wikipedia ↗
Collaborative Drug Discovery, Inc.
Company type
Private
Industry
Founded2004 (2004)
HeadquartersBurlingame, California, U.S.
Products
  • CDD Vault
  • PharmaKB
  • CDD Public
Websitecollaborativedrug.com

Collaborative Drug Discovery (CDD) is a software company founded in 2004 as a spin-out of Eli Lilly by Barry Bunin, PhD. CDD utilizes a web-based database solution for managing drug discovery data, primarily through the CDD Vault product which is focused around small molecules and associated bio-assay data. In 2021, CDD launched its first commercial data offering, PharmaKB,1 formerly BioHarmony,2345 as The Pharma KnowledgeBase, which is centered around pharma company, drug, and disease information for research, business intelligence, and investors.

Products

1. CDD Vault6789 is a research informatics web platform by Collaborative Drug Discovery. It contains several modules for collaborative project teams to manage, analyze, and share both private & public data. It is used by biotech companies, CROs, academic labs, research hospitals, agrochemical and consumer goods companies. CDD Vault is a modern web application for chemical registration, assay data management, and SAR analysis.10 It is designed to be simple to use and extremely secure.

CDD Vault modules Type Description
Registration11812 Chemical registration system Web application within CDD Vault for chemical and biological registration, assay data management, and SAR analysis.
Activity1314 Experimental data Web application within CDD Vault for managing and analyzing experimental data associated with registered entities, and generating reports.
Visualization1514 Scientific visualization Web application within CDD Vault allowing plotting and analysis of large data sets to find interesting patterns, activity hotspots, and outliers.
Assays16179 Bioinformatics Web application within CDD Vault for Assay Informatics to allow for easy registration, search, and systematic comparison of assays using standardized protocols and runtime details.
ELN181920 Electronic lab notebook Web application within CDD Vault that integrates a full analysis and visualization environment with chemical and biological assay data repositories.
Inventory219 Inventory management software Web application integrated within CDD Vault for tracking the supply and location of compounds and reagents.
Curves2214 Curve fitting Web application integrated within CDD Vault to generate, QC, and analyze results such as IC50, pIC50, EC50.
AI239 Artificial intelligence in pharmacy Web application within CDD Vault for Artificial Intelligence (AI) capabilities such as identifying similar compounds, synthesizable molecules, bioisosteric suggestions, and patent issues.
Automation 24172526 API, Data mapping Web application within CDD Vault to connect data through an API, Parser, and Mapping Tools.
CDD Public272817 Chemical database Free database also integrated within CDD Vault for fostering open collaboration containing over 3 million molecules accessible to everyone in the drug discovery community.

2. PharmaKB is a knowledgebase for pharma-related information. Available data spans (preclinical, clinical, financial, patents, and post-approval) information about companies, drugs, and diseases. It is designed to be used by researchers, those practicing business intelligence, and investors. PharmaKB also offers real-time updates with a subscription model instead of static reports. As a throwback to CDD Vault's slogan of "Complexity Simplified", PharmaKB uses the slogan of "Data Simplified" and promotes a data trilogy of Company, Drug, and Disease. The product is meant to expand the company's scope from working with mostly preclinical researchers to being relevant for clinical and post-approval stages of drug development, including: Pharmacovigilance or Drug Safety, Regulatory Affairs, Competitive Intelligence - also referred to as Pharma Intelligence within its industry, and Pharmacoeconomics as well as investors and publishers of medical content.

Collaborations

The capability for inter-group collaboration attracted attention from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, who in 2008 awarded CDD with a two million dollar grant being used to support researchers combating tuberculosis.29

In 2010, GlaxoSmithKline released 13,471 molecules screened for activity against malaria to the public. These molecules and their associated screening data are available via CDD Public, as well in as the National Library of Medicine's PubChem and the European Bioinformatics Institute's ChEMBL database.30 This data has served as the basis for several cheminformatics analyses.313233

In February 2011 CDD began participating in the collaborative MM4TB project led by Stewart Cole34 and including participants from AstraZeneca and Sanofi Aventis.35

The CDD Book

Inside CDD Vault: A Different Kind of Silicon Valley Success Story is a 2025 non-fiction book by Barry Bunin, founder of Collaborative Drug Discovery.

The book describes the development of Collaborative Drug Discovery and its software platform, CDD Vault, through accounts from employees, collaborators, and scientists associated with the organization. It focuses on the human and organizational aspects of building a life sciences software company and supporting collaborative approaches to drug discovery.36

Reception

The book was reviewed by Drug Discovery World, which described it as an account emphasizing the human side of scientific software development and collaborative approaches to drug discovery.37

See also

See also

References

References

  1. "CDD Milestones". Collaborative Drug Discovery Inc. July 17, 2019. Retrieved December 9, 2022.
  2. "PharmaKB- Knowledgebase Update". www.pharmakb.com.
  3. "CDD Launches BioHarmony". www.prnewswire.com (Press release). Retrieved December 9, 2022.
  4. Balakrishnan, Rama; Berg, Ellen L.; Butler, Christopher C.; Clark, Alex M.; Denker, Sheryl P.; Feierberg, Isabella; Harris, Jason; Ikeda, Timothy P.; Jeschonek, Samantha; Makarov, Vladimir A.; Southan, Christopher; Vanderwall, Dana; Winstanley, Peter (December 1, 2024). "Bioassay protocol metadata annotation: Proposed standards adoption". SLAS Discovery. 29 (8) 100188. doi:10.1016/j.slasd.2024.100188. ISSN 2472-5552. PMID 39427714.
  5. "FAIR Annotation of Bioassay Metadata – Pistoia Alliance – FAIR Toolkit". fairtoolkit.pistoiaalliance.org. Retrieved April 1, 2026.
  6. "USPTO TSDR Case Viewer".
  7. "CDD Vault Benefits". August 11, 2019.
  8. Natali, Eriberto; Hersch, Jana; Freiberg, Christoph; Steigele, Stephan (2025). "Advancing large-molecule discovery with a unified digital platform for data analysis and workflow management". mAbs. 17 (1). doi:10.1080/19420862.2025.2555346#abstract (inactive April 1, 2026). PMC 12439557. PMID 40947578. Retrieved April 1, 2026.{{cite journal}}: CS1 maint: DOI inactive as of April 2026 (link)
  9. "Collaborative Drug Discovery Vault: Banking on Shared Data | National Center for Advancing Translational Sciences". ncats.nih.gov. Retrieved April 1, 2026.
  10. Kumari, Mala (2023). "Computational approaches streamlining molecular modelling and drug designing" (PDF). Research Spectra. 4 (2): 76–125.
  11. "CDD Vault Registration - Collaborative Drug Discovery Inc. (CDD)". www.collaborativedrug.com. August 7, 2024.
  12. "CDD Vault". Global Laboratory eTools. Retrieved April 1, 2026.
  13. "CDD Vault Activity - Collaborative Drug Discovery Inc. (CDD)". www.collaborativedrug.com. August 7, 2024.
  14. Maher, Steven P; Bakowski, Malina A; Vantaux, Amélie; Flannery, Erika L; Andolina, Chiara; Gupta, Mohit; Antonova-Koch, Yevgeniya; Argomaniz, Magdalena; Cabrera-Mora, Monica; Campo, Brice; Chao, Alexander T; Chatterjee, Arnab K; Cheng, Wayne T; Chuenchob, Vorada; Cooper, Caitlin A (September 30, 2025). "A drug repurposing approach reveals targetable epigenetic pathways in Plasmodium vivax hypnozoites". eLife. 13 RP98221. doi:10.7554/eLife.98221. ISSN 2050-084X. PMC 12483515. Archived from the original on February 6, 2026.
  15. "CDD Vault Visualization Analysis Tool". August 7, 2024.
  16. "CDD Vault Assays - Collaborative Drug Discovery Inc. (CDD)". www.collaborativedrug.com. August 7, 2024.
  17. Workflow-Informatics/CDD-Python-SDK, Workflow Informatics, December 9, 2025, retrieved April 1, 2026
  18. "CDD Electronic Lab Notebook (ELN)". August 7, 2024.
  19. Edfeldt, Kristina; Edwards, Aled M.; Engkvist, Ola; Günther, Judith; Hartley, Matthew; Hulcoop, David G.; Leach, Andrew R.; Marsden, Brian D.; Menge, Amelie; Misquitta, Leonie; Müller, Susanne; Owen, Dafydd R.; Schütt, Kristof T.; Skelton, Nicholas; Steffen, Andreas (July 5, 2024). "A data science roadmap for open science organizations engaged in early-stage drug discovery". Nature Communications. 15 (1): 5640. Bibcode:2024NatCo..15.5640E. doi:10.1038/s41467-024-49777-x. ISSN 2041-1723.
  20. "CDD Vault". ELN Finder. April 1, 2026. Retrieved April 1, 2026.
  21. "CDD Vault Integrated Inventory System". August 7, 2024.
  22. "CDD Vault Curves". August 7, 2024.
  23. "CDD Vault AI - Collaborative Drug Discovery Inc. (CDD)". www.collaborativedrug.com. August 7, 2024.
  24. "CDD Vault Automation - Collaborative Drug Discovery Inc. (CDD)". www.collaborativedrug.com. August 7, 2024.
  25. "CDD Vault Access from StarDrop". Optibrium. September 21, 2023. Retrieved April 1, 2026.
  26. "CDD Vault Tools & Services | Workflow Informatics". June 13, 2025. Retrieved April 1, 2026.
  27. "Public Access". July 18, 2019.
  28. Swinderman, Amy. "Opening the door to data flow". Drug Discovery News. Retrieved April 1, 2026.
  29. "Collaborative Drug Discovery Receives Grant to Support the Development of a Database to Accelerate Discovery of New Therapies Against Tuberculosis". Archived from the original on July 6, 2010. Retrieved August 24, 2010.
  30. "New research identifies promising leads to follow in search for medicines to fight malaria" (Press release). London: GlaxoSmithKline. May 19, 2010. Archived from the original on June 1, 2010.
  31. Ekins, Sean; John Williams, Antony (2010). "When Pharmaceutical Companies Publish Large Datasets: An Abundance of riches or fool's gold?". Drug Discov Today. 15 (19–20): 812–815. doi:10.1016/j.drudis.2010.08.010. PMID 20732447.
  32. Ekins S and Williams AJ, Meta-analysis of molecular property patterns and filtering of public datasets of antimalarial “hits” and drugs, MedChemComm, 1: 325-330, 2010. doi:10.1039/C0MD00129E
  33. Ekins S, Kaneko T, Lipinski CA, Bradford J, Dole K, Spektor A, Gregory K, Blondeau D, Ernst S, Yang J, Goncharoff N, Hohman M and Bunin BA, Analysis and hit filtering of a very large library of compounds screened against Mycobacterium tuberculosis, Mol Biosyst, 6: 2316-2324, 2010, doi:10.1039/C0MB00104J
  34. "UPCOL – Cole Lab – Chair of Microbial Pathogenesis".
  35. "More Medicines for Tuberculosis". MM4TB. Archived from the original on January 19, 2022.
  36. "Behind the Code: The Human Side of Collaborative Drug Discovery". Collaborative Drug Discovery. Retrieved March 23, 2026.
  37. "Book review: Inside CDD Vault". Drug Discovery World. November 18, 2025. Retrieved March 23, 2026.
External links