News

As a public-private partnership, the European Lead Factory (ELF) has already been instrumental in boosting early drug discovery. Its continuing goal is to offer unrivalled opportunities for the discovery of new lead drug lead molecules – to public and private organisations – in order to address unmet medical needs.

Paris and Gothenburg, 3 April 2018 – Servier, an independent international pharmaceutical company, and Scandicure, a Swedish spin-out of the University of Gothenburg, today announced the establishment of an agreement to exploit Scandicure’s innovation in the field of metabolic disease.

EDELRIS, a medicinal chemistry company, shares several LinkedIn posts explaining the key factors in the European Lead Factory that make their work possible. In their second post, EDELRIS tells more about their collaboration with the academic groups: 

Prof Mabel Loza, coordinator of REDEFAR, the Spanish Network of Excellence in Drug Discovery, and the European Lead Factory executives Dr Dimitrios Tzalis and Dr Ton Rijnders have signed a Memorandum of Understanding for collaboration in future initiatives.

At the end of 2017, Prof Reuven Stein received an extraordinary Qualified Hit List from the European Lead Factory. His research group studies the tumour microenvironment (TME) and has discovered a protein that plays an essential role in tumour progression. With the promising ELF compounds, they hope to develop new treatments for cancers such as glioma and melanoma.

After receiving its Qualified Hit List last year, the biotech company CELLIPSE has been successfully working together with the European Lead Factory (ELF) on their Improved Hit List.

In their latest newsletter, Pharma Focus Asia incorporated an interview with Ton Rijnders, Head of Screening at the European Lead Factory. They were curious about the results of the European Lead Factory, but also about the success factors, learnings and the future of ELF. 

Under the topic “Success Stories”, the European Commission recognises the impact and potential of the European Lead Factory. The Directorate-General Research and Innovation highlighted that ‘researchers working on any human disease can call on a great resource to develop new drugs.’ 

On Thursday 22 February, the European Lead Factory (ELF) won the Multiparty Collaboration award at the Scottish Knowledge Exchange Awards ceremony 2018. This reward, organised by Interface, recognises and rewards the impacts achieved through collaborative academic and business partnerships.

The European Lead Factory has been continuously recruiting high quality target programmes over the past years. With a clear infographic, the European Lead Factory makes the process of growing its portfolio visible.

The European Lead Factory (ELF) scientists are not shy of applying new techniques to deliver the best possible results. A recent perspective, published in SLAS Discovery, describes how getting hot (or not) can help in the triaging of primary HTS hits.

On 30 January 2018, Stefan Baumeister defended his dissertation ‘Investigation of the properties of Acyl Protein Thioesterases and their role in Ras depalmitoylation’ at the Max Planck Institute of Molecular Physiology (MPI) in Dortmund. His thesis describes structural determinants for selectivity between two closely related enzymes.

The SciLifeLab Director and the European Lead Factory executives of the European Screening Centre and the Public Chemistry Consortium have signed a Memorandum of Understanding for collaboration in future initiatives.

The EU Lead Factory screening collection is assembled by and for both industry and public parties. This alternative innovation model is what the authors envision for the future.

Until now, the Innovative Medicines Initiative (IMI) has launched almost 100 projects to tackle the barriers that currently limit the efficiency, effectiveness and quality of medical research and drug development.