Collaborative Drug Discovery (CDD), owner of the CDD Vault, a comprehensive drug discovery informatics platform for research laboratories, has asked researchers what they think biotechnology world will look like after Covid-19. A few responses are listed below.
“Covid-19 may be the tipping point that shifts us from the current model of “sick-care” to a more proactive, preventative, participatory and personalised “health-care” model. Sadly, the virus has highlighted how the presence of lifestyle diseases like obesity, hypertension and type 2 diabetes can increase a person’s risk of succumbing to infectious disease. While we cannot change a person’s chronological age, we may see more payer investment and provider effort to reduce a person’s biological age via proactive therapeutics and emphasis on a healthy lifestyle”, said Mia Nease, Founder and CEO, Multiomic Advisory Services.
“Primary health care centres around the world must be strengthened and there must be super-efficient international disease surveillance systems. We are interconnected; the mindset that things don’t matter just because they happen elsewhere is deeply flawed. Conversely, when people work together, great strides can be made quickly, as evidenced by the fact diagnostics that combine innovations and reagents from multiple countries are reaching the market in record times”, said Marco Biamonte, Founder and CEO, Drug Discovery for Tropical Diseases, highlighting that Malaria kills over 200,000 people each year, mostly children, but people rarely hear about it.
Domingo Gargallo-Viola, CSO, ABAC Therapeutics, said the Covid-19 pandemic “is only the tip of the iceberg for challenges that the human species has faced and will face, with respect to infections. Tuberculosis, malaria, gastrointestinal and respiratory infections have killed and continue to kill millions of people every year in poor countries” and the attention to Covid-19 could bring more attention to other infections that plague humanity. “The health and economic crisis generated by Covid-19 has highlighted many of our weaknesses, and now we all share the need to enhance cooperation between countries, emphasising the fact that the challenge of infectious diseases can only be resolved through collaboration and transnational research”, he added.
“As a researcher in the Middle East, I can say it’s time to take a part in global academic research because we have all learned from Covid-19 how connected and small the world is in times of crisis. We all need each other and need every single effort to fight, survive and learn. We can achieve more when we make resources, instruments, materials, information and software available to all so that researchers can work as a team when lives are on the line”, said Nathalie Moussa, Ph.D. Candidate, Medicinal Chemistry and Quality Control Department, Damascus University.
CDD is based in San Francisco, California. Its flagship product, CDD Vault, is a hosted software system that helps scientists manage and analyse chemistry and biology data. It includes functionalities for Registration and Activity, Inventory, Data Visualisation, and Electronic Laboratory Notebook, and enables secure, real-time data sharing. Standigm from Seoul, South Korea, a company that uses artificial intelligence (AI) technology for drug discovery and development, recently announced that it has selected the CDD Vault platform to complement its AI technology and facilitate the advancement of its collaborative drug discovery projects. “We have done an exhaustive evaluation of platforms available in the market and made our selection of CDD Vault. Besides its other merits, it is flexible enough to fit our in-house software with the ease of straightforward implementation,” said Jinhan Kim, CEO, Standigm.
