An Interview with Barry Bunin, CEO of Collaborative Drug Discovery (CDD

Barry Bunin, founder & CEO of CDD Vault shares how he built the secure cloud platform for biotech.

We are glad to have Barry Bunin interview for the audience of Future of Health Tech. He is the founder and CEO of Collaborative Drug Discovery, one of the pioneers of cloud-based, secure data management & collaboration software for biotech.

Can you tell our audience about yourself?

I am the Founder, CEO & President of Collaborative Drug Discovery (CDD). Prior to CDD I was an entrepreneur in residence at Eli Lilly & Co., Founder & CEO of Libraria, and have co-authored Chemoinfomatics and Chemical Synthesis textbooks.

I started out in the lab working on medicinal synthetic chemistry in an effort to develop patented new chemo types for protease inhibition at Axys Pharmaceuticals (now Celera) and RGD mimics to inhibit GP-IIbIIIa at Genentech.

My family is composed of doctors and as I left for college to carve my own path, I was torn between a major in eastern religions, or a major in chemistry. I went on to receive my B.A. from Columbia University and my Ph.D. from UC Berkeley, where I synthesized and tested the initial 1,4-benzodiazepine libraries with Jonathan Ellman.

From there I gravitated towards spaces where I felt I could make a maximum impact in our field (drug discovery) and to provide a positive example in the world around me. One way we do this is by making our technologies collaborative to help biologists and chemists work better together.

A second way we do this is by applying the technologies equally to commercial and neglected diseases (since the informatics challenges are conserved).

I have and continue to be motivated by the idea of contributing to a larger goal – not just helping one scientist or lab, but potentially all scientists and all labs in the pursuit of accelerating therapeutics, drug discovery, and related fields.

The major insight is to provide secure scientific data analysis capabilities that can be used by regular scientists and encourage maximum secure collaboration – this is the power and economic advantage of high quality web-based software.

The healthcare industry is constantly evolving, it’s both motivating and exciting to be at the forefront of innovation and change. As part of CDD, I’m driven by the opportunity to make a real difference in the lives of people and to further the humanitarian efforts of our team, in harmony with our commercial growth.

Can you tell our audience about Collaborative Drug Discovery (CDD)?

The headquarters of our company is based out of Burlingame California, with our team members spanning across the globe. I started working on CDD Vault during my time as an entrepreneur in residence at Eli Lilly & Co. in 2003-2004. Following my stint at Eli Lilly there was a time that I spent working out of my living room as we navigated continued development of the platform, CDD really took off around 2008. We have been growing and improving not only our platform, but our team ever since. Since turning profitable, we’ve doubled our cash in the bank three times, while doubling our number of employees who are passionate and motivated to contribute to the advancement of drug discovery and data management. We have expanded to work with biotech, pharmaceutical, academic, consortia/collaborations, agritech, and a variety of consumer goods R&D teams. The initial focus at CDD has shifted to help as many teams as our platform can, without sacrificing quality or focus.

We are constantly developing our product to offer the best platform possible while also continuing our moral focus on neglected diseases in the developing world. For example, our publicly announced work with the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation on treatments for Tuberculosis and other efforts in neglected diseases over the years.

Ultimately our platform creates value through the software via the data and collaborations that CDD Vault. Logins from paying customers has now surpassed 5,000,000. We wanted our platform to be equally applicable to open collaborative and secure, private commercial drug discovery. With CDD, we’ve had the opportunity to broadly transform how research is conducted. That is personally satisfying to me, and a credit to our dedicated team through decades of creative, hard work.

What problem is CDD solving & how?

CDD is solving the problem of inefficient data management in the field of biological and chemical research. This is a known bottleneck in drug discovery and other areas of life science research.

According to a survey by Nature, over 70% of researchers have tried and failed to reproduce another scientist’s experiments, with data management being cited as a significant factor. This problem has been compounded in recent years by the exponential growth of data generated in modern research, which often requires collaboration across multiple disciplines and organizations.

CDD helps teams overcome this problem by providing a collaborative and secure web-based database that lets scientists easily archive, mine, and share data which comes from ongoing experiments. What sets our platform apart is the user-friendly approach we’ve taken to interface, and the ability to configure data displays, making it easy to upload all sorts of biological and chemical data.

Additionally, CDD offers multiple levels of security (Defense in Depth) and has passed big pharma and government audits for private data, which is required in a field where data confidentiality is mandatory (since the data is the IP). We are a modern company and platform, with an open ear to new technologies that improve our platform – we listen to every request from every prospect and customer and prioritize the voice of the customer.

Our platform touches on many of the struggles faced by today’s scientists. It simplifies the process of managing and sharing data, saving researchers time and reducing the risk of errors. It enables collaboration across teams and organizations, accelerating the pace of research and enabling the discovery of new drugs and treatments that can improve the lives of people across the world.

What have been the biggest achievements of CDD in the last year?

One of the things I am most proud of is our recent initiative to offer free subscriptions to CDD Vault for academic scientists in Africa (see: https://www.collaborativedrug.com/cdd-vault-offer-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. It’s inspiring to see the ongoing impact our platform offers to those seeking to make a difference.

We have been fortunate enough to receive multiple grants over the past year, including a $1,119,880 supplemental grant from National Library of Medicine to develop an Automated Molecular Identity Disambiguator, an $880,000 grant from National Center for Advancing Translational Sciences to develop virtual approaches to new chemistries, and a $2,517,214 supplemental grant from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation to provide CDD Vault for secure data sharing and collaborative analytics services and support across the Tuberculosis (TB) Drug Accelerator (TBDA). It’s important to note that CDD is a commercially profitable organization that does not rely on the above funding for sustainability. These funding sources allow us to do work that the commercial markets would not otherwise support.

We have experienced significant revenue growth over the past year. We’ve seen an increase in demand for our data management and analysis solutions not only in drug discovery, but in other segments such as agritechnology, CRO, and consumer goods markets. Our collaborations with academic institutions, government agencies, and industry partners have also grown, as we continue to improve the resources we provide and refine our platform.

Hiring: The CDD team has grown substantially over the past year. We have added several talented individuals to our team in various areas, including software development, research, sales, marketing, accounting, and customer support. We’re excited to continue to expand our team and bring on individuals who are passionate about our mission and the people we help.

What have been the biggest challenges in building CDD & how did you overcome them?

Building CDD presented its fair share of challenges, the biggest challenge was being one of the first web-based hosted drug discovery informatics platforms. My joke is we got all the arrows in the back when no one believed a hosted database could be trusted (pre-AWS), and all the arrows in the back when other vendors with behind-firewall solutions claimed to be cloud-based too. To emphasize the security and privacy, we named the platform CDD Vault – like a bank vault, so even on a subconscious level, folks would be reminded of the security. We have a detailed security white paper, that we only share under confidentiality, enumerating all the steps our security officer and development team take to safeguard the data. We handle proprietary intellectual property in a manner that the researcher (Vault Admin) determines the level of information sharing. We recognize that many researchers keep their data private for various reasons within a single company for some projects, yet may collaborate for others. CDD Vault has refined data partitioning capabilities to support researchers’ natural workflows.

How do you think, technology will change healthcare in the next 5 years?

With all of the excitement (both hype and substance) surrounding AI in recent months, I believe that there is limitless opportunity for accelerated growth in drug discovery and healthcare as a whole. However, the models are only as good or bad as the underlying data. CDD has focused on the really important (even if seemingly mundane aspect) of handling the data really well. Make the data easy to capture, easy to understand, easy to mine, easy to partition and easy to share. Drug Discovery Software does revolutionize drug discovery and accelerate the development of new therapies by providing more efficient and accurate data management and analytics. It isn’t just about predictions, but also about seeing the patterns within the data. With collaborative software, all aspects of data management, including the shiny new AI-assisted drug design, makes the process of developing drugs faster and less costly, enabling researchers to explore a wide range of potential treatments. One proof that a software is useful is that it is widely used. It took over a decade to get over 1M user logins, now it is increasing more hat much every year (passed 5M most recently).

In the next 5 years I anticipate these tools becoming more and more commonplace as a way to harmoniously enhance drug discovery R&D, and any related fields involving biological and chemical activity data.

What are your favorite educational resources, and how have they influenced you?

I am inspired by the idea that the whole is greater than the sum of its parts, and by listening and learning from people of all walks of life we can effectively multiply our own knowledge and understanding. We learn and listen to everyone, this is the inspiration behind the collaborative focus of our team and platform at CDD.

In a more traditional sense, I regularly listen to podcasts and read articles that cover psychology, business, management, and anything that piques my curiosity. I am a big fan of Derrick Lowe’s “In the Pipeline” blog for medicinal chemistry and Seth Godin’s Blog for Entrepreneurship. I work with collaborators to share our own thoughts, on the CDD website blog via the series eponymously titled “Drug Discovery Industry Roundup”.

Is there anything else, that you want to share in this interview?

You can read more about our inspiring Mission, Values, and Milestones over the decades on our CDD Milestones page at https://www.collaborativedrug.com/about/