Abstract

Chemical compounds, which are selected for their ability to exert a specific biological effect on cellular targets, represent versatile chemical probes in basic research to advance our understanding of pathologies at the molecular and cellular level and to validate novel drug targets. At the same time, bioactive compounds represent starting points for the development of new effective therapeutics. In fact, the majority of marketed drugs today are small molecules. Despite the benefits, the discovery of these compounds requires significant efforts in terms of state-of-the-art facilities, expertise (e.g., in assay development or medicinal chemistry) and resources (e.g., compound collections), which are often unavailable to most academic researchers. As the European Research Infrastructure for Chemical Biology, EU-OPENSCREEN ERIC supports researchers with the aim to accelerate drug discovery efforts in an open-access setting through collaborations with researchers from academia and industry.The consortium brings together > 30 partner sites in 10 European countries. EU-OPENSCREEN uses various types of compound collections: a collection of ca. 2,500 known bioactives and a 2,500-compound diversity collection, both for assay validation and pilot screening experiments; a diversity collection with ca. 100,000 commercial compounds; a growing collection of compounds which have been submitted by academic chemists; and a fragment-library with 968 fragments and 88 so-called “minifrags”. The fragment library is jointly used in fragment-based screening campaigns by EU-OPENSCREEN partners and structural biology groups of the Instruct-ERIC/ iNEXT-Discovery consortia allowing researchers to perform structural screens and subsequently use medicinal chemistry expertise to progress fragment hits. Here we will present EU-OPENSCREEN services and its compound collections and the collaborative multidisciplinary effort in the discovery of new therapeutics.