News

On the 25-26 April the European Lead Factory (ELF) Stakeholder Meeting and 5th General Assembly took place close to Heathrow/Windsor, UK. With an exciting agenda focussing on four years of successful collaboration, the impact of the European Lead Factory and the future of drug discovery, the meeting was considered a great success by all participants.

The European Lead Factory recently reached the milestone of having received over 1,000 library proposals for consideration.  These proposals have been considered by its Library Selection Committee, leading to the approval of 627 library designs for synthetic validation.

In a world-first type of collaboration, Parkinson’s UK and the University of Sheffield have launched a joint venture biotech company, Keapstone Therapeutics. Parkinson’s UK has allocated 1 million GBP over the next sixteen months to further develop compounds that boost the internal cellular defence mechanisms against oxidative stress.

We can. I can. That is the message that is spread during World Cancer Day, on 4 February. How can you – as a collective or as an individual – take action to reduce the global burden of cancer? The European Lead Factory currently has 34 programmes that focus on various targets related to cancer.

The European Lead Factory (ELF) is boosting the discovery of new drugs by making high throughput screening and a quality compound library available to academia and biotech’s. To be eligible, the proposed project has to meet certain conditions. For example, the project should be considered as innovative and it should be possible to optimize the associated assay for high throughput screening.

A recent review in Frontier in Medicine describes the outcomes and learnings of the first 3,5 years of European Lead Factory (ELF) operations.

With help of the European Lead Factory, the Phosphodiesterase Inhibitors for Neglected Parasitic Diseases (PDE4NPD) project takes the next step towards developing novel drugs against kinetoplastid parasites such as Trypanosoma brucei, the causative parasite of African sleeping sickness, and Trypa

The latest issue of BioCentury Innovations focuses on open innovation within early drug discovery and compound sharing, with the European Lead Factory as one of the best practices, with the largest compound library openly available. More and more pharmaceutical companies open their compound libraries in collaboration with the external community and/or other companies. 

The European Lead Factory is proud to announce the first doctoral promotion based on compounds screened with the EU Lead Factory project. On 1 December, Freek Janssen defends his thesis on drug discovery and target validation for the Leiden University.

Dr. Margit Mahlapuu, one of the academic researchers who has benefited from EU Lead Factory screening activities by identifying a drug candidate series for type 2 diabetes, went on to create a spin-out company based on these results.

The EU Lead Factory opens its doors again for young researchers from across Europe

The University of Oxford takes the next step in targeting antimicrobial resistance, with help of the results and hit compounds delivered by the European Lead Factory. The Oxford team, led by Professor Chris Schofield, has got the opportunity to collaborate with the European Gram-Negative Antibacterial Engine (ENABLE) project to further progress this programme towards clinical development.

Business Planet Magazine interviewed Dimitrios Tzalis (Founder & CEO of Taros) and Jan Skriwanek (Innovative Medicines Initiative (IMI) state representative of Germany) on the role of SMEs in the EU Lead Factory.

The European Lead Factory congratulates 18 early career researchers who have been selected to participate at the Annual Chemistry Learning & Achievements meeting hosting the Early Career Researcher Workshop in Lisbon, Portugal, 3-4 November 2016!

European Lead Factory generates data from high throughput screening and detailed mechanistic studies at sites across Europe and these are deposited in a central database for analysis.