SRI International and Collaborative Drug Discovery have received a Phase I Small Business Technology Transfer Research grant from the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases to develop computational tools for tuberculosis drug discovery research.
The one-year, $149,000 award will support the development of tools for a tuberculosis information repository.
When it is complete, the repository will contain inference and analysis tools that can facilitate tuberculosis drug development efforts through a combination of multiple databases, cheminformatics, and pathway-based analysis, SRI and CDD said.
Specifically, biological data derived from the repository will be combined with logic-based modeling and inference techniques developed by scientists at SRI and cheminformatics-based computational prediction techniques developed by CDD.
Barry Bunin, president and CEO of CDD, said in a statement that the project will make it possible for investigators to "mine the deposited data, search for new potential targets and lead molecules" from a "single centralized location."
Sean Ekins, collaborations director at CDD, added that the partnership with SRI will result in "a synergistic computational tool" that will be used for "hypotheses testing, knowledge sharing, data archiving, data mining, and drug discovery."