Short overiew showing ODDT a new mobile app in alpha for open drug discovery teams. Illustration of genesis and development so far.

1. Open Drug Discovery Teams
(ODDT): How our Collaboration
Led to a New App For
Collaboration
Dr. Sean Ekins
Collaborations in Chemistry, A division of Collaborations in
Communications, Inc.
Dr. Alex M. Clark
Molecular Materials Informatics, Inc.

2. When Given a New Challenge How
do You Respond?
• Mid January Pistoia Alliance Ask for volunteers
to present in a Dragon’s Den Scenario Feb 8th
at the RSC
• Ideas that will transform Pharma R&D in 2014
• So my natural response was :
“If I am going to take part I want to create
something real”

3. Why it is time to transform R&D –
This is just one disease!
• Tuberculosis Kills 1.6-1.7m/yr (~1 every 8 seconds) equivalent to malaria
• 1/3rd of worlds population infected!!!!
• Extensively drug resistant increasing incidence
• No new drugs in over 40 yrs
• Drug-drug interactions and Cc-morbidity with HIV
• Recent years have seen increased investment from Bill and Melinda Gates
Foundation (BMGF) etc.
• But no impact on new clinical candidates except from pharma
• Pipeline is thin and weak
• No data sharing on the scale of malaria
• Open Source effort in India (OSDD) but no real international traction
• Disconnected efforts - CDD, Pharmas, Academia, NIH
• BMGF & NIH do not coordinate TB efforts, not mandating open data.
– Result data hoarding – still not learning from failure – thousands of compounds
screened and not accessible

4. Inspiration
• There are many 1000s of diseases
and few with cures
• Science Online 2012 on open notebooks and data
overload
• Flipboard
• Could we create an app
for science like Flipboard?

5. So I started sketching on my iPad..

6. How would we go about finding
these teams?

7. Can we create virtual teams of open
researchers – we need a central hub to
integrate open science data

8. Everything is on the cloud and the
App becomes the glue for the team
and projects

9. How the App should look – note the
Flipboard inspiration

10. Sounding Boards are Very Important
• Antony J. Williams VP, Strategic
development for ChemSpider at
the Royal Society of Chemistry.
• Alex M. Clark is the founder of
Molecular Materials
Informatics, Inc.
• Alex said he could build the App

11. Within about 10 days Alex Created
ODDT to present at the Pistoia meeting
Focused on Tuberculosis, Malaria, HIV/AIDS, Huntington’s
Disease, Sanfilippo Syndrome, and Green Chemistry as topics in version 1
We did not win the competition but had useful feedback – the need to
articulate the value proposition

12. The Value Proposition
• The project is intended to bring together open data in a single aggregated
collection, and then facilitate forming open research teams around this
data
• Disseminate important information to a highly relevant target audience
• Network and discover other researchers with complementary
interests, and opportunities to collaborate
• Team members will be able to borrow and reuse a growing collection of
existing Open data.
• The community as a whole can debate, contest or endorse data based on
its quality.
• The app could also be used as a type of “lab notebook” whereby individual
researchers share links (URLs) to content and the app aggregates these.

13. Getting to the Free Alpha Version
• Added more topics – Chagas
Disease, leishmaniasis
• Added voting
• Added Stats page
• Added datasheet viewing
• ….Find testers

14. Latest Layout
9 Panels includes one
on ODDT information
Can use multiple
Twitter accounts
Here is my icon
Stats summary
About App

15. Tap on a panel and look at
Incoming contents
Click here to
endorse or
disapprove
Click here to
follow hyperlink
Incoming is
sorted by time
of creation

16. Browse through multiple pages of
tweets

17. Endorse, Disapprove and Comment

18. Endorse content or reject it

19. Recent contents
Click on image to
open it
Recent is
factoids with
a vote count
of +1 or
better

20. Content
Click on image to
open it
Ranked content
Content is
currently
anything with
a vote
count of +1 or
better, sorted
by most
popular first

21. Tap on a link or image

22. Be able to download content

23. Look at your own statistics

24. Exposing rare diseases – creating
communities of research and
sparking discussion
My tweets on
recent analyses
and ideas
My Retweets

25. Summary
• From idea to alpha testing version in a month
• Well on way to delivering a tool for R&D and
the general public
• Future versions will allow user to specify
topics

26. Coming Soon
• Rewards – badges
• Image handling – HTML web crawling
• Beta version
• Presentation at ACS meeting
• General release – Post ACS meeting
• More ideas that may need funding to cover
server etc
• - Would you fund us if we posted ODDT on
Kickstarter or Petridish.org ??
• Are there sponsors for specific pages or content?

27. Thank you Alpha
testers
• Antony J. Williams
• Hans De Winter
• Chris Swain
• Andrew Lang
• Carlo Yuvienco
• Paul Reinheimer
• Michael S. Lajiness
• Nancy Connell
• Greta Beekhuis
• Joe Hupcey III
• Freundlich, Joel
• Tanya Parrish
• Peter Olinga
Photo for San Fillipo Syndrome courtesy
of Jill Wood www.jonasjustbegun.org
ODDT

28. More Information
• Please contact us for further details or suggestions at:
aclark@molmatinf.com and ekinssean@yahoo.com
• You can learn more about the ODDT app at:
http://www.scimobileapps.com/index.php?title=Open_D
rug_Discovery_Teams
And frequent blogs at http://www.collabchem.com and
http://cheminf20.org/

29. Data to Appify?
• If you have Drug Discovery data or ideas that
could be turned into an app please let us
know
• Alex Clark has developed these other Apps