Situation
Roopa Rai is the Founder and CEO of Isosterix. With over 25 years of experience, Roopa has held leadership positions in discovery research in various therapeutic areas including oncology. She has a successful track record of driving programs from discovery to IND-ready compounds including six clinical
candidates. Past positions include SVP, Discovery Research at Myoforte Therapeutics and Senior Director of Chemistry at Medivation and Assembly BioSciences. She is a co-author/inventor on 70+ patents and publications. She has a Ph.D. in Organic Chemistry from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and has done postdoctoral research at Cornell University and Stanford University. Rai founded Isosterix to develop small-molecule inhibitors of KAT6A, an epigenetic oncogene that is implicated in multiple cancers including breast, prostate, lung, ovarian and hematological cancers. KAT6A/B are histone acetyl transferases (HATs), a new class of epigenetic regulators. KAT6A is a promising new oncology target particularly in endocrine-resistant breast cancer. Isosterix has inhibitors that are selective for KAT6A over other HAT family members, including its paralogous protein Kat6B.

Solution
As Rai created her new company, she deployed Collaborative Drug Discovery’s (CDD) Vault, the hosted drug discovery informatics platform that securely manages both internal and external biological and chemical data. This was an easy decision, as she had been using CDD Vault for more than a decade while working at other biotech companies. Rai has also consulted with companies that don’t use CDD Vault, which reminds her of how much she values it. ”I have used CDD Vault for years and couldn’t do the work that I do without it,” Rai says. “CDD Vault helps speed time to discovery.” Isosterix uses CDD Vault to store some 350 compounds. Rai uses CDD Vault to register compounds, view assays, perform data searches, SAR analysis, and to securely collaborate with the company’s consultants and offshore CRO.

Benefits
Isosterix has found a number of benefits since adopting CDD
Vault, including:

• Providing a “single source of truth”
• Speeding time to drug discovery
• Serving as a powerful tool for startups
• Supporting collaboration with consultants and CROs
• Protecting intellectual property
  

Providing a “Single Source of Truth”
Having worked widely within the world of pharmaceutical research, Rai appreciates the significance of CDD Vault providing what many refer to as a “single source of truth.” She notes that the alternative is too often a collection of spreadsheets or other forms of decentralised data stores which can make it difficult and time consuming to determine where the most recent data resides. “With CDD Vault, the freshest data is always just a click away,” Rai says. “The moment new data is uploaded into CDD Vault, it’s available to all scientists registered on your CDD Vault.”