The prestigious Bio-IT World Best Practices prize has been granted to the European Lead Factory (ELF) for its Honest Data Broker (HDB) implementation of the ScienceCloud platform from BIOVIA.

ELF also announces the synthesis of >50,000 new high quality compounds based on public proposals. These compounds were subsequently included in the Joint European Compound Library (JECL).

Andrew Pannifer from the University of Dundee and Herman van Vlijmen from Janssen led development of the HDB with BIOVIA. Andrew Pannifer said that winning the Best Practices prize in the Knowledge Management category brought official recognition to the ELF project’s achievements in designing and managing a unique Intellectual Property (IP) model: “Our custom implementation of ScienceCloud HDB is a core technology supporting the ELF project. It combines fine-grained permissions with efficient access to the vast range of chemistry and biology data it stores.” Herman van Vlijmen said that HDB is a valuable research tool: “One of our key goals at the ELF has been to make sure that good science can be conducted while safeguarding IP interests.”

“Delivering collaboration and analysis capabilities with ScienceCloud in support of ELF’s Honest Data Broker application was a key goal”, said Mathew Hahn, senior vice president and chief technology officer at Dassault Systèmes-BIOVIA. “We are delighted to have won the Bio-IT World award with the ELF – particularly with the judges’ assessment that ‘ScienceCloud is the only platform in its class.’”

 Highlights

• The Honest Data Broker (HDB) developed by ELF and BIOVIA wins a Bio-IT World prize
• HDB enables delivery of 39 programmes to biological target owners
• HDB data points processed to date: > 40 million
• >320,000 compounds contributed by 7 EFPIA partners
• ≥50,000 public compounds synthesized by ELF partners
• Forthcoming Bioorganic & Medicinal Chemistry Symposium in Print 

 50,000 novel compounds added to the JECL

Professor  Adam Nelson from the University of Leeds, and Chair of the Consortium’s Library Selection Committee, said that new IT tools have also been developed to support the enhancement of the JECL: “The web-based submission tool built by ChemAxon has been instrumental in recruiting innovative chemistry proposals – with 550 library proposals already considered and new proposals coming in every month. Reaching 50,000 compounds successfully synthesised by consortium partners is a tremendous achievement at this stage of the project. ”

“Not only are we now a quarter of the way to our 200,000 public compound target, but the compounds themselves are proving to be very distinctive when compared with typical screening collections. They are much more three-dimensional, and they provide new areas of chemical space to be explored.” 

Didier Roche, VP of Strategic Innovation, EDELRIS, said that a special Bioorganic & Medicinal Chemistry Symposium in Print is being published in May, containing 13 articles describing some of the synthetic methods and scaffolds used to expand JECL: “We are seeing very clear evidence that the output of the ELF is allowing us to explore uncharted areas. There are diverse chemical scaffolds, which are not commercially available or represented within the subset of the JECL contributed by the EFPIA companies.  The growing JECL is a key asset to enable the identification of compounds that modulate a wide range of novel target classes.”

Irene Norstedt, IMI* Acting Executive Director, said, “The European Lead Factory is a wonderful example of how IMI makes it possible for big pharmaceutical companies and talented scientists in many other organisations to pool their resources, creating a unique and much-needed infrastructure. The European Lead Factory is already helping researchers across Europe to advance their drug discovery programmes, and so will ultimately deliver benefits for patients and society.”

The European Lead Factory was established to promote the discovery of novel lead compounds, suitable for subsequent optimization either to drug candidates or to high?quality pharmacological tools for the experimental validation of targets. Following a pre-competitive innovation model, the starting point for the JECL was more than 320k compounds contributed from private chemical libraries of seven members of the European Federation of Pharmaceutical Industries and Associations (EFPIA): Bayer Pharma, AstraZeneca, Lundbeck, Janssen, Merck KGaA, Sanofi, and UCB. 

An additional 200,000 novel compounds for inclusion in the JECL are being produced by participating academic institutions and SMEs in the European Lead Factory. A consortium of 30 partners from industry and academia conducts all project workflows. HDB enables secure sharing of chemistry and biology data, and of triaged compounds that show promising characteristics for research programmes. 

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