Collaborative ALS Drug Discovery Initiative (CADDI)

Launched in 2008, CADDI is a major new program of early stage ALS drug discovery projects that combine the biological and mechanistic expertise of investigators around the world with our dedicated drug discovery team.

Our Laboratory for Drug Discovery in Neurodegeneration (LDDN) was established in the fall of 2001 to discover chemical agents that could become the starting points for further development into a new generation of drugs to treat Alzheimer’s disease, ALS, Huntington’s disease, MS, Parkinson’s disease, and other neurodegenerative diseases. To accomplish this goal, we recruited a permanent staff of industry-seasoned scientists with specialties in assay development, laboratory automation, informatics, and medicinal chemistry, to work in close collaboration with principle investigators, post-doctoral fellows, and graduate students from across the neuroscience academic community. In this way, LDDN transforms discoveries in the basic biology of neurodegeneration into opportunities for drug discovery. (For more on our drug discovery model, click here)

Thanks to generous support from Project ALS,  the ALS Therapy Alliance, Prize4Life, and private donors, late 2008 we announced a major new ALS-specific drug discovery program known as CADDI (Collaborative ALS Drug Discovery Initiative). Building upon our existing drug discovery platform and expertise, CADDI establishes collaborations between ALS experts from around the country with our drug discovery scientists, with the aim of transforming basic neurobiological findings in ALS into focused ALS drug discovery programs.

Postdoctoral fellows from labs with ALS expertise work closely with our drug discovery scientists and benefit from the LDDN’s biotech-like atmosphere. The CADDI offers postdocs a fully funded year at the LDDN, plus in-house expertise in assay optimization, screening and medicinal chemistry, in an intellectually open and challenging environment that stresses collaboration.

During the initial year of each new ALS drug discovery project, visiting fellows work closely with members of LDDN's permanent staff as well as other scientists who come to the LDDN to pursue drug discovery research. The scientific goals of the year are to: (1) design an assay based on the basic science the fellow brings to the LDDN, (2) develop this assay specifically for the purposes of high-throughput screening (HTS), (3) conduct a full-scale screen of LDDN's collection of more than 150,000 drug-like molecules, and (4) if screening results are sufficiently promising, to work with LDDN’s medicinal chemists to start optimizing the compounds for greater potency. Promising projects are continued as a collaboration to further optimize the chemical compounds identified.

The CADDI program is co-chaired by renowned ALS researcher and physician Dr. Robert H. Brown and LDDN director and seasoned drug discovery scientist Dr. Ross Stein.

Although our RFA is currently closed, for details of the sorts of projects we are looking for, please read the most recent RFA.

Click here for RFA

We are always looking to identify investigators who share our commitment to early stage ALS drug discovery. If you have ideas you would like to discuss with us, please contact us:

This e-mail address is being protected from spam bots, you need JavaScript enabled to view it
Co-Director, Laboratory for Drug Discovery in Neurodegeneration
Director, Medicinal Chemistry
Tel 617.768.8640

This e-mail address is being protected from spam bots, you need JavaScript enabled to view it
Co-Director, Laboratory for Drug Discovery in Neurodegeneration
Director, Leads Discovery
Tel 617.768.8661

This e-mail address is being protected from spam bots, you need JavaScript enabled to view it
Director, Harvard NeuroDiscovery Center
Tel 617.432.3370