Revolutionizing Drug Discovery: How CDD Vault Transforms Scientific Collaboration and Innovation
Dive into the future of drug discovery with Caley Anderson, Business Development Director at Collaborative Drug Discovery, in this episode of The Hatch Podcast. Discover how CDD Vault is transforming scientific research, swapping outdated paper notebooks and spreadsheets for a cutting-edge, secure SaaS platform that drives real-time global collaboration. Caley unveils how CDD Vault is breaking down data silos and accelerating innovation, enabling scientists to register entities, perform complex multi-query searches, visualize data dynamically, and leverage AI to enhance analysis—all in one robust system.
With a legacy of 20 years and partnerships with leading organizations like the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and the NIH, Collaborative Drug Discovery has become a force in advancing research for rare and neglected diseases. Caley shares her journey from the healthcare business world to pioneering breakthroughs in drug development, underscoring the transformative impact of CDD Vault on researchers worldwide.
Join us for a compelling look at the future of scientific collaboration, data management, and innovation.
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Transcript:
Host:
Hatch. This is the Hatch Podcast, where technology comes to life. A Hatch Fairhope production.
Host:
At Hatch Fairhope, we’re all about cultivating creativity, driving innovation and accelerating growth. Welcome to the Hatch Podcast. Each episode will bring you inspiring conversations with innovators who are pushing boundaries, solving problems and building the next wave of success. Today, we’re joined by Caley Anderson, Business Development Director from Collaborative Drug Discovery, a company that has been empowering biologists and chemists with cutting-edge software solutions for 20 years. Their flagship product, CDD Vault, is revolutionizing how researchers in academia, biotechnology and pharmaceuticals organize and analyze their data. We’ll be diving into how CDD Vault is making it easier for scientists around the world to collaborate, innovate and accelerate drug discovery. Caley, thanks so much for sitting down with us today, and welcome to Fairhope.
Caley Anderson:
Thanks so much for having me, Stephanie.
Host:
Let’s just jump right in and talk about how you got connected with Collaborative Drug Discovery
Caley Anderson:
. Sure, I guess, to share a little bit about my background. I’m actually not a scientist, though I do get the opportunity to work with some brilliant scientists. My background is business administration and economics and after grad school I worked for Cardinal Health for a number of years about seven or so as a MedSurge product sales rep. I’ve always had a passion and interest for healthcare and the opportunity presented itself to work for collaborative drug discovery, and I was really intrigued by the opposite side of the healthcare spectrum, of going from patient bedside to what’s happening at the bench and how can we support research. And yeah, I’d say that kind of led me here today and happy to be representing and serving the Southeast US region with CDD.
Host:
Can you tell us a little bit about the evolution of the company?
Caley Anderson:
Sure. So we’re really proud to be celebrating, actually, our 20th year of innovation and excellence as of April earlier this year, in 2024. But we’re a SaaS-based company based out of Burlingame, California, and our product, CDD Vault, is the data management platform that allows us to work with scientists globally. Throughout the 20 years of being in business, we’ve had the opportunity to work with the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, the NIH, who actually uses CDD Vault as their central data repository for the BPM project. We’ll work with anyone from startup to big pharma and academic universities, nonprofits, foundations, really, I like to say any sort of research, preclinical research, I should say, with rare and neglected diseases being something that’s also very near and dear to our CEO Barry’s heart.
Host:
So for the average listener, Can you explain a little bit more why data management is so important and maybe talk about some of the inefficiencies that you were seeing for the company to decide to create CDD Vault?
Caley Anderson:
Yeah, sure. So I would say big picture. You know, 10% of drugs in phase one will actually make it to market. That’s over a timeline of, on average, I would say, about 10 years, and it costs anywhere from $1 to $2 billion. So that is a lot of data.
Caley Anderson:
And in this instance, your data is your IP, it is your asset, and so how it’s being managed can be critical to the success of an organization.
Caley Anderson:
And if you’re not using a sophisticated platform such as CDD Vault, that means a lot of paper notebooks or Excel spreadsheets.
Caley Anderson:
And the thing about meaningful research it deserves a little more than a paper notebook or an Excel spreadsheet.
Caley Anderson:
So you know, whether it’s drug discovery or, again, really any sort of preclinical research, what our platform does is it allows people to collaborate, one in a secure environment, but also in real time. So, especially in a world, you know, post-covid and with remote work on the rise, having access to a lifetime’s worth of work at your fingertips from anywhere in the globe, you know, in real time is breaking down data silos within organizations, between chemists and biologists, where sometimes you might find that those two teams actually aren’t working together but also the ability for collaboration among external stakeholders. So, whether that’s industry and academia or dealing with, say, a CRO almost 30 days to receive, you know, data back from an experiment being ran, from when they actually get those results. And our platform actually alleviates, you know, a problem such as that by allowing, in this instance, say, a CRO, to go ahead and input the data directly into the platform and said company or you know researcher to be able to look at it instantly.
Host:
So now let’s dive a little deeper into the functionality of the platform for those who do understand data management.
Caley Anderson:
Yeah, sure. So I would say just some functionality. So with CDD Vault you have the ability one we’re going to help manage and analyze your experimental data. So you have the ability to register entities, whether that’s small molecules, biologics, mixtures, and understand the structure activity relationship. You can run multi-query parameter searches on a lifetime of work and get results in seconds. You can save those searches and share them with others.
Speaker 3:
One piece of functionality that I always love to mention is just the ability to partition access and visibility, which I think is huge for organizations, because sometimes you don’t need someone to be privy to. You know certain pieces of information or you only want them to see what they need, and so we provide that ability, and that also comes in handy for patents or ahead of compliance, or you know regulatory patents or ahead of compliance, or you know regulatory. But we also, through the platform, you have the ability to track inventory, say, of samples or reagents. We have a really powerful visualization module, and so that allows you to look at large data sets and interact based on graphs, so you can look for trends or outliers. We’ve got I would say kind of new an AI component, and so you can run similarity searches against the Kimball or Shur-Kimball database and get back a list of, you know, hundreds of related compounds that are sorted by similarity.
Speaker 3:
Yeah, so I mean, ultimately I mean those are just a few things as far as you know people for who I’m speaking the right language but ultimately I would say what we’re doing is we’re giving back the time for researchers to actually focus on their science, and so you know a few really important pieces there again protecting your IP, reducing error and risk and the IT burden and those are really important pieces that, if you’re able to provide that back to someone especially, say, if you’re in a startup, you know, founder situation.
Speaker 3:
A lot of times people refer to CDD Vault as their single source of truth, which I think is really nice, because whether you’re using it as your data repository or keeping your experiments or unstructured data captured in our ELN, we also have a RESTful API, and so that allows us to integrate with other platforms that might be a part of your existing workflow, and what that does is that really just sits CDD Vault at the center of your data management ecosystem. So I like to say that because we like to play nicely, you know, with other people, because really, at the end of the day, it’s about our customer success, because when they are successful, everyone benefits, and I think that’s a really important piece to our company.
Host:
So the reason you’re actually getting to sit down with us and chat is because you’re in town today for our cohort finale event with the Hatch Fairhope Powered by Bessel program. How did you guys get connected with Hatch and with the cohort?
Speaker 3:
Yeah, so I think I mentioned that I represent the Southeast US at Collaborative Drug Discovery and Jenny Hobgood, who is on my team she’s actually an Alabama native and this was all of her doing. She connected with Hatch and reached out, you know, saw the value there of what the cohort was offering these companies and wanted to be a part of it and actually really made the push for us to sponsor. And so I’m really happy that she brought me along to come in and see firsthand, because I’m really excited to listen to all of the pitches this evening and learn about all the wonderful innovation that’s coming out of the cohort. And ultimately, selfishly, because it’s in the Southeast, so that’s, of course, near and dear to our heart.
Host:
So, for anyone wanting more information on CDD and the data management platform, where can we find you guys?
Speaker 3:
Oh yeah, you can come check out, actually, our newly revamped website. So shout out to our wonderful marketing team. Would love to one show off the new website. But collaborativedrugcom, and I guess it’s worth mentioning as a way to give back to the scientific community. We offer a free version of our visualization tool as well, as we have some published data sets that I would encourage people to go take a look. In addition to that, we do offer customized demos, so it’s always important to us to kind of understand what people’s needs are and understand what it is that they’re researching, and we tailor our demos based to that workflow and then, if needed, we can talk about some evaluations.
Host:
Awesome. Thanks again, Caley, for sitting down with us. We appreciate it. I’ll see you later tonight.
Caley Anderson:
Yeah, thanks so much for having me.
Host:
This has been the Hatch Podcast, a production of the Hatch Team in Fairhope, Alabama. Host Stephanie Glines, producer Tim Scott, executive producer and creator Keith Glines. Visit hatchfairhope. com for more information.