The European Lead Factory (ELF) is the first pharmaceutical and life sciences partnership of its kind. It has been designed to create unrivalled opportunities for the discovery of new drug lead molecules. Academics and SMEs now have access to an ‘industry-like’ discovery platform. Scientists with innovative biology target and chemistry scaffold owners are welcome to participate in the European Lead Factory.
Seven large pharmaceutical companies have joined forces and contributed compounds from their proprietary collections to the core Joint European Compound Library (JECL). This library will grow from 300,000 compounds in 2013 to 500,000 compounds in 2017 (Feb 2017, 450000). Targets from public partners are screened at the top-modern, industry-standard European Screening Centre (ESC) at no upfront cost, as funding is provided by the Innovative Medicines Initiative (IMI). Further exploitation of generated hits is subject to a number of conditions. This unique large-scale experiment, combining open innovation, crowdsourcing and several established pharmaceutical companies, is in its 4th year producing exciting scientific results. All ELF screens are performed at PPSC.
This presentation will focus on the High Throughput Screening operations and the involved robotic infrastructure. As of January 2016, 35 HTS campaigns were performed covering a wide range of target classes, including more demanding classes like ion channels and protein-protein interactions. Almost all HTS assays have been successfully miniaturized to 1536 format in order to perform them in a cost-efficient manner. Full screens are typically performed within 2-3 days with 1 example where the 320,000 library was screened in one single day.
The research leading to these results has received support from IMI under grant agreement n° 115489 and EFPIA companies’ in-kind contribution.
Monique van Amstel, Pivot Park Screening Centre