The European lead factory—an experiment in collaborative drug discovery

Abstract

The European lead factory-an experiment in collaborative drug discovery. © 2015 Hugh Laverty, et al. This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/), permitting all non-commercial use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. 20 REVIEW ARTICLEThe European lead factory-an experiment in collaborative drug discovery Abstract: The European Lead Factory (ELF) is a unique collaborative public-private partnership aiming to deliver innovative drug discovery starting points and improving the value generated by ultra-High Throughput Screening (uHTS) approaches. Composed of a unique compound collection derived from private pharmaceutical company collections and complemented with new chemistries from a unique public collection, it offers a unique uHTS platform accessible to both private companies and publicly funded researchers. One of the key challenges in setting up ELF has been to balance access to screening results with protecting the value of compounds in the collection. Through an 'honest data broker' data management platform and a royalty reward scheme based on achieved milestones, ELF has been able to overcome these challenges. Set up in 2013, it has already accepted 42 targets for screening, submitted by publicly funded researchers, and generated 12 Qualified Hit Lists. In addition, 55,000 new library compounds have been generated by the public partners and added to the 320,000 compounds made available by the companies. Although it faced many challenges in becoming operational, this unique experiment in collaboration is already generating exciting results that will hopefully, eventually lead to better medicines and tools to advance our biological knowledge, and should act as a template for future approaches in the area.

The European Lead Factory: A Blueprint for Public–Private Partnerships in Early Drug Discovery

“…Experts from all essential areas of early DD—industry, academia, and SMEs—now jointly produce high-quality output for the wider public benefit. In this time, the PPP has published >30 articles and the results from the first crowdsourced ideas gradually disseminate in the public domain for everyone to assess (6, 12, 13, 15, 19–48). …”

“…As a consequence, the current drug target project portfolio is complementary and clearly different from the industry (13, 18). It includes many targets considered as highly challenging, such as protein–protein or protein–DNA/RNA interactions (15% of the projects), and very few of the most pursued target types, e.g., kinases (7%) and proteases (4%) (Figure 2A).…”

“…With this in mind, the Innovative Medicines Initiative’s (IMI) European Lead Factory (ELF) project was launched, with an aim to create a collaborative PPP DD platform to seed and execute early-stage projects more effectively (13). By combining an industry-standard HTS infrastructure (European Screening Centre), a state-of-the-art Joint European Compound Library (JECL) and newly developed information technology (IT) solutions, ELF enables any European biotech company or research institute to access, free of charge, tools, resources, and know-how that were once available exclusively in the large pharmaceutical companies (14).…”

Towards a systems approach for chronic diseases, based on health state modeling

“…An intensive, open debate on the best approach for a particular problem, and open access to data that can help to select among alternative approaches, are features associated with good science . Since the successful paradigm of open source software in informatics has infected an increasing number of areas related to health innovation, including bioinformatics, the screening of chemical libraries, as well as the generation of tools for research on new kinds of drug targets, an intense debate has developed on the role for an extension of those fragmented experiences in particular areas of science into a more comprehensive, interdisciplinary ‘open science’ approach that includes innovative models for enabling a faster translation of research results to patients ( Laverty et al , 2015 ; Low et al , 2016 ; Munos, 2010 ). Indications in which innovative approaches at a similar level of complexity were tested ‘end-to-end’ have added further fuel to the debate, with the malaria field taking a prominent position among those translational pioneers ( Wells et al , 2016 ).…”

Chemical Reactivity Descriptors and Molecular Docking Studies of Octyl 6-O-hexanoyl-β-D-glucopyranosides

“…Despite heavy investments into basic and applied pharmaceutical research and steadily increasing public and private efforts the unmet medical need is still considered [24]. In this regard, to accelerate drug targets and development of new medicines High Throughput Screening (HTS) has been considered [25]. The recent outbreak of a pandemic situation due to COVID-19 (severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus-2, its different variants) has further created a necessity for related potential drugs [26][27][28].…”