Public Compound Collection

10 leading academic groups and 7 leading SMEs

The European Lead Factory has world-class chemistry assets in place, designed to facilitate the successful development of a Public Compound Collection of around 200,000 novel compounds. This new public collection has complemented the existing EFPIA compound collection, together creating the 500,000-strong European Lead Factory compound library.

Academic partners

The EU Lead Factory project brought together 10 leading European academic groups and institutions, with proven expertise in biological chemistry and library design. They have published some of the most influential papers internationally on topics including:

  • productive navigation of biologically-relevant chemical space
  • innovative design of compound libraries with a high hit rate in screening assays
  • discovery and application of high-quality chemical probes to elucidate biological mechanisms
  • synthetic approaches that enable the systematic exploration of chemical space.

Publications

Contributions from academic partners have been cited over 38,000 times, with a median H index of ~23 (Web of Science, May 2012), and all have publications that currently rank in the top percentile of their field (Essential Science Indicators, July 2010). Many of their outputs that are directly relevant to this project have been published recently, confirming the quality of expertise on offer within innovative library design and synthesis.  Since January 2009, various partners have published 176 papers on the following:

  • cheminformatic approaches (18 papers)
  • novel scaffold synthesis (95 papers)
  • novel methods for scaffold decoration (8 papers)
  • bioactive ligand discovery (56 papers) ​

Overall, partners have collectively published over 1700 papers.

SME partners

Seven of Europe’s most successful small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) in the field of contract chemistry services were participating, helping to translate innovative design ideas into industry‐standard compound libraries. They have very significant essential capabilities and capacity, with 350 employees in total and cutting-edge lab facilities. They were able to synthesize the required numbers of compounds to an industrial specification within tight time frames and budgets.