Knowledge-sharing at the PostDoc Learnings and Achievements meeting

The first two EU Lead Factory Chemistry Meetings - PostDoc Learnings and Achievements (October 2014 and March 2015) were a great success. The goal of the meetings was to give scientists from the small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) participating in the EU Lead Factory chemistry consortium an opportunity to present and discuss their scientific work. The latest event saw a record attendance of 59 EU Lead Factory Chemistry Consortium members.

In total, 15 oral presentations from Edelris, Mercachem, Sygnature, Syncom and Taros researchers were evaluated by a panel of expert industrial chemists representing 6 EFPIA partners within the ELF consortium. The scope of the presentations included aspects of library design and chemistry validation, reflecting the important and growing contributions made by SMEs in the submission and validation of novel scaffolds to the EU Lead Factory – in addition to their focus on library production. Overall, more than 30 innovative scaffolds have been described by the presenters and most of the presented scaffolds are now further developed.   
The EFPIA partners reviewed the scientific content presented, and were impressed by the extraordinary work performed by the SMEs and their full commitment to the EU Lead Factory. The prize for best oral presentation, kindly sponsored by Sanofi, was awarded to Dr. Gavin Milne (Sygnature) for his work on “Heterogeneous Catalysis: A Key Tool in the Synthesis of sp3-Rich Scaffolds”.

The next EU Lead Factory Chemistry event is planned for January 2016 and will feature a mixed scientific programme from academic groups and SMEs, thus offering another fantastic occasion to learn from each other and continuing our delivery of an innovative compound collection for biological screening.