CDD Vault

Pros

In our drug discovery organization, CDD is a central feature for biological data storage, analysis, and reporting. Its intuitive interface requires a minimal learning curve to register compounds, generate assay curve fittings, and produce useful data reports. Numerous built-in options allow additional customization to your projects or your organization. Sharing specific data with collaborators is very easy through the use of readily available links, user-defined collections, and saved searches. We use separate virtual vaults to record, communicate, and assess new design ideas, thanks to a growing list of "calculated chemical properties" offered within CDD Vault. The support team at CDD is exceptionally responsive and helpful, allowing all our requests to be promptly and effectively answered.

Cons

The CDD team is eager to keep improving their product via customer feedback, and thus most of the CONS eventually get resolved over time. One function that we would really benefit from is a temporary "working space", where data could be reviewed and analyzed by the uploading scientist prior to publishing to the main vault for all collaborators to see and use.

Pros

Each feature is well thought out, tested (yes tested!) and documented. The interface is clean and does not overwhelm the end user or admin with unlimited configuration. I have helped deploy this software at over a dozen biotechs and most are up and running in a week. Compare that with a an expensive slow deployment of most other drug discovery platforms.

Loading data into the system is quite easy and reliable with "error" and "warning" messages which are descriptive. Searching for and viewing data also gets high marks. From an admin perspective I find the system to have very low overhead.

Cons

There is not a lot I dislike about CDD, most items are addressed by the development team via a request. If I had to pick something it would probably be updating DRC data (specifically DRC) which has already been processed by end users. Ultimately this can be a bit cumbersome as you can either update in the CDD interface which is not quite perfect for editing this data OR you can reload the data. Reloading the data is less than desirable so it would be great if the interface undergoes some renovations.

Pros

We use CDD to store, manage and analyze large amounts of drug discovery data generated from high-throughput screens and dose-response assays. To automate data analysis, we make extensive use of curve-fitting software (which works!). We've found numerous benefits of using the CDD software for drug discovery. For example, one can quickly find all data associated with a given compound ' and within that data, track down data associated with individual batches of the compound. We also use CDD to share data with our collaborators using a feature of saving searches, which entails the collaborator simply clicking a button to visualize data in a format that we set up.

The best feature, of course, is that CDD's staff is fantastic and incredibly helpful. Unlike other companies, they quickly get back to us to address our questions ' often by phone ' and have made every effort to facilitate our work so we can focus on drug discovery and not spend our time worrying about database management.

Pros

As a bioinformatician scientist I find this tool very useful.
It serves both our biologists and medicinal chemists scientists.
The fact that it includes additional outsource valuable resource of information e.g. PDB, Chemogenomics databases assists sometimes in first-step hits characterization.
Helps to organize the data coming from different sources e.g. Genedata
Flexible tool; you can add your own features such as comments, supplier, synthesis notes etc
The Support team should get 13 out of 10 STARS, one of the best support that I got.

Cons

The QC process currently only provide several reports, but I think that professional tools that enables to search the database directly could be better.

Pros

We are running HTS and hit to lead using a semi-virtual model: all bicohemical and cellular testing is done in house; med chem, chemistry, ADME/PK and XTAL is external. The Vault is our primary communication tool. Our med chemists check daily for new biochemical and/or cellular dose response data to drive SAR and design of new analogs. When we hold virtual meetings, we use the Vault as our primary tool for sharing data. It is extrememely convenient to be able to pull up all of the data on a compound, along with physicochemical properties, and eastily search for data on related compounds, etc. The ability to eliminate outliers from dose response curves on the fly is also very handy, as it allows you to firm up SAR in real time.

Cons

Uploading new compunds can be tricky if different SMILES formats are used.