Tuesday, October 2, 2012

NIAID's Grant to Help TB Patients

NIH’s National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) awarded a second grant to Collaborative Drug Discovery Inc. (CDD) and SRI International to continue their joint efforts to develop an information repository and software to identify novel therapeutics for tuberculosis.

The Phase II Small Business Technology Transfer Research grant will support the next two years of research and focus on extending a systems biology cheminformatics approach to develop molecular mimics and then computationally evaluating the results for drug efficacy.

CDD and SRI researchers will further evaluate molecules discovered in Phase I, expand the scope of search for lead molecules for TB, and develop a software product for bioscience research use. The software will provide powerful query and analysis capabilities and include links to other drug discovery tools and databases.

“The validation of our approach focusing on neglected diseases such as tuberculosis and their research communities has enable us to develop a technology that can be used for secure sharing of data and is broadly useful,” said Barry Bunin, President & CEO of CDD. “We welcome the opportunity to work with other groups to develop our combined ideas into fundable research projects and ultimately commercial products.”