African researchers are now able to access Collaborative Drug Discovery’s CDD Vault resource for neglected disease drug discovery collaborations.
Collaborative Drug Discovery (CDD), a scientific informatics company that provides data management and analysis solutions, is offering free subscriptions to CDD Vault for select academic teams of scientists in Africa who are developing new drugs to combat neglected tropical diseases.
This initiative aims to foster scientific collaborations across the continent and empower African research teams working towards finding cures for diseases that have historically been neglected.
The free CDD Vault subscription provides access to essential and advanced tools such as chemicals and biological entities registration, inventory management, assay and study management, visualisation, data analysis and reporting, as well as secure data sharing and collaboration.
The initiative is “much needed and timely,” says Dr Kelly Chibale, Professor of Organic Chemistry at the University of Cape Town (UCT) and Director of the UCT Drug Discovery and Development Centre: “The CDD solution is specifically tailored to the needs of the drug discovery researchers and will allow proper organisation of data to enhance the impact of the research, reduce duplication of efforts and provide African researchers with the platform to facilitate collaboration.”
Levelling up scientists in Africa
To be eligible for the free CDD Vault subscription, applicants must be affiliated to an academic institution in Africa, and submit a brief summary of their research project on neglected or tropical diseases. They must also demonstrate a focus on the discovery of novel drugs for tropical neglected diseases, which include malaria, dengue fever, leishmaniasis, Chagas disease, and others. The subscription will be valid for a year, renewable each year.
CDD has a long history of supporting scientific research and humanitarian drug discovery, and this will be the fifth free service offered by the company. The other four services that are open to the public are: a free data visualisation tool, curated metadata for 3860 MPLCN Assays, open source computational tools published on Github, and data contributed by various research groups hosted on CDD Public.
“Having had the privilege of supporting drug discovery projects focused on neglected tropical diseases across the world for nearly two decades, we are thrilled to launch this grant programme to provide support to academic teams of scientists in Africa who are committed to finding new drugs to combat these diseases. It is our hope that this programme will help to level up scientists in Africa and provide them with valuable resources and access to cutting-edge technology, ultimately leading to ground-breaking discoveries that can improve global health,” said Dr Barry Bunin, CEO of CDD.
