The European Lead Factory – A Successful Model of Collaborative Drug Discovery
Stuart McElroy,
Head,
University of Dundee
The IMI - European Lead Factory is the first pharmaceutical and life sciences partnership of its kind, combining open innovation, crowdsourcing and contributions of several established pharmaceutical companies. Three years after the start, the first scientific results have been evaluated and an overview of the portfolio and case study of screening and triaging will be presented. The project has been designed to provide European academics or SMEs access to industrial scale drug discovery infrastructure and compound libraries at no upfront cost. Targets are screened at the industry-standard European Screening Centre (ESC) against the Joint European Compound Library (JECL). Seven large pharmaceutical companies have joined forces and contributed proprietary compounds to this compound library and a detailed analysis revealed the character of these compounds and the complementarity of the 7 library contributions. Since January 2015, the screening set has been further complemented with novel compounds synthesised by the EU Lead Factory consortium based on crowdsourced library design ideas. The European Lead Factory project has received support from the Innovative Medicines Initiative Joint Undertaking under grant agreement n° 115489, resources of which are composed of financial contribution from the European Union's Seventh Framework Programme (FP7/2007-2013) and EFPIA companies’ in-kind contribution.
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