Scientific Journal Verifies Uniqueness of European Lead Factory’s Public Screening Collection

A scientific publication released this month in “Drug Discovery Today” details the results of a benchmark study performed on the screening collection being currently designed and synthesised within the European Lead Factory Consortium of which Sygnature Discovery is very proud to be a part.

Dr Simon Hirst, Founder and Chief Executive Officer of Sygnature Discovery said: “Sygnature is pleased to be one of the Discovery SME partners in what is proving to be a successful ELF collaboration. The consortium of SMEs and academics has already delivered 50K compounds with novel scaffolds which have the potential to accelerate drug discovery activities throughout Europe and beyond. We look forward to continuing working with all of our partners in the ELF to deliver the remaining 150K compounds in the Public Compound Collection.”

The European Lead Factory (ELF), initiated in 2013, is a €196 million collaborative venture financed by the Innovative Medicines Initiative (IMI) and is aimed at boosting the initial phases of the drug discovery process. Pharmaceutical companies, academic groups and five Discovery small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) have formed a pan-European consortium to address the challenge of delivering an innovative, publicly-accessible, screening deck of synthetically-tractable compounds, named the Public Compound Collection (PCC). As part of the ELF, the seven participating pharmaceutical companies have contributed over 300,000 chemical compounds from their corporate chemical collections and the academic and SME members will deliver ~200,000 compounds from untapped areas of biologically-relevant chemical space.