Barry Bunin

CEO & President Collaborative Drug Discovery

Last Reviewed: September 18, 2026

Executive Summary

Barry A. Bunin, PhD, is the CEO and President of Collaborative Drug Discovery, which he founded in 2004 as a spin-out of Eli Lilly and which builds CDD Vault, a cloud platform for managing and sharing drug discovery data. He is a chemist first: he took his doctorate at UC Berkeley with Jonathan Ellman, synthesizing and testing the initial 1,4-benzodiazepine libraries — foundational work in combinatorial chemistry — and did medicinal synthetic chemistry at Genentech and Axys Pharmaceuticals before moving into software. He is a co-inventor on the patent behind Kyprolis, the multiple myeloma drug widely viewed as the centrepiece of Amgen’s $10.4 billion acquisition of Onyx Pharmaceuticals.

Career Highlights

• Founded Collaborative Drug Discovery in 2004 as an Eli Lilly spin-out and leads it as CEO and President.
• Co-inventor on the patent behind Kyprolis (carfilzomib), granted accelerated FDA approval for multiple myeloma.
• Synthesized the initial 1,4-benzodiazepine libraries with Professor Jonathan Ellman at UC Berkeley.
• Developed patented chemotypes for protease inhibition at Axys Pharmaceuticals and RGD mimics at Genentech.
• Founding CEO, President and CSO of Libraria, now Eidogen-Sertanty.
• Author of two books on cheminformatics and combinatorial chemistry, and of “Inside CDD Vault” (2025).
• Received the 2019 Passion in Science Award from Drugs & Diagnostics for Tropical Diseases.

Professional Journey

Bunin took a BA in Chemistry at Columbia University and a PhD at the University of California, Berkeley, working with Professor Jonathan Ellman on the synthesis and testing of the initial 1,4-benzodiazepine libraries. That work sits near the origin of combinatorial chemistry, the approach of generating and screening large numbers of related compounds rather than synthesizing candidates one at a time, which reshaped early-stage drug discovery.

He went into industry as a medicinal synthetic chemist, developing patented new chemotypes for protease inhibition at Axys Pharmaceuticals, later Celera, and RGD mimics to inhibit GP-IIbIIIa at Genentech. He was subsequently founding CEO, President and Chief Scientific Officer of Libraria, now Eidogen-Sertanty, and served as an Entrepreneur in Residence with Eli Lilly.

Collaborative Drug Discovery spun out of Eli Lilly in 2004 around a problem Bunin had experienced from inside the laboratory. Drug discovery data — compound structures, assay results, screening outcomes — was held in inconsistent local systems, which made it difficult to work with internally and nearly impossible to share with collaborators. Since much discovery work happens across institutional boundaries, between pharmaceutical companies, academic laboratories, and non-profits, that fragmentation imposed a real scientific cost: results were lost, duplicated, or never connected to each other. CDD Vault was built as hosted infrastructure for storing, mining and selectively sharing that data, with the selective sharing being the hard part, since collaboration requires exposing some data while protecting the rest.

The approach proved particularly valuable in neglected and tropical disease research, where the participants are dispersed and under-resourced and the case for pooling data is strongest — work recognized by the 2019 Passion in Science Award from Drugs & Diagnostics for Tropical Diseases. Bunin has written two books on cheminformatics and combinatorial chemistry and, in 2025, an account of the company itself, “Inside CDD Vault: A Different Kind of Silicon Valley Success Story.”

Education

University of California, Berkeley

PhD, Chemistry

Columbia University

BA, Chemistry