Abstract
The European Lead Factory (ELF) is a public–private partnership (PPP) that provides researchers in Europe with a unique platform for translation of innovative biology and chemistry into high-quality starting points for drug discovery. It combines an exceptional collection of small molecules, high-throughput screening (HTS) infrastructure, and hit follow-up capabilities to advance research projects from both private companies and publicly funded researchers. By active interactions with the wider European life science community, ELF connects and unites bright ideas, talent, and experience from several disciplines. As a result, ELF is a unique, collaborative lead generation engine that has so far resulted in >4,500 hit compounds with a defined biological activity from 83 successfully completed HTS and hit evaluation campaigns. The PPP has also produced more than 120,000 novel innovative library compounds that complement the 327,000 compounds contributed by the participating pharmaceutical companies. Intrinsic to its setup, ELF enables breakthroughs in areas with unmet medical and societal needs, where no individual entity would be able to create a comparable impact in such a short time.
Highlights
While we continuously obtain a better understanding of disease-causing mechanisms, we still face a number of challenges when translating these findings into therapeutic products that reach patients’ needs [1, 2].Innovation and discoveries derived from academic research institutes have great potential to be developed into clinically meaningful products; it is clear that these parties often lack the resources and experience to fully progress their findings toward the clinic
Despite large investments and advances in basic and applied pharmaceutical research in recent years, the success rate in drug discovery (DD) and development of innovative therapies in most disease areas has been low as a result of this translational gap [2, 3]
Three years after the start of the project, European Lead Factory (ELF) has matured from a start-up initiative to a well-organized group of over 150 scientists
Summary
While we continuously obtain a better understanding of disease-causing mechanisms, we still face a number of challenges when translating these findings into therapeutic products that reach patients’ needs [1, 2]. This cohesive PPP contains three essential assets for bridging the innovation gap of early DD: (i) access to a state-of-the-art chemical compound collection [15, 16], (ii) access to screening facilities of industrial standards, and (iii) access to the expertise required to convert the obtained results and data into potential drug candidates. After a first screen against all available compounds in the collection (currently over 400,000), the so-called primary hits (typically a few thousands) are further evaluated to confirm engagement with the defined drug target and to establish activity levels of desired and undesired biological effects At this point, three to five different types of assays have been applied and the number of interesting compounds is narrowed down to typically a few hundreds. Environment, as one single unit, despite the different nature and interests of the various participating stakeholders (academia— SME—pharmaceutical industry) [19]
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