The European Lead Factory, Europe’s largest collaborative drug discovery platform, has selected BioAscent as a partner in ESCulab (European Screening Centre: unique library for attractive biology), a new project to push forward the transformation of potential drug targets to new medicines.

The European Lead Factory has secured a total project budget of EUR 36.5 million under the second framework of the Innovative Medicines Initiative, and BioAscent is one of only 20 partners in 7 countries chosen to deliver support to the project.

Jon de Vlieger, coordinator of the European Lead Factory consortium at Lygature, commented: “It’s truly exciting to continue the onboarding of new and innovative proposals for screening and provide high quality starting points for drug discovery to academics and SMEs throughout Europe. In an effort to broaden our scope we are not only looking for target-based approaches, but now also enable phenotypic screens.”

Dr Sylviane Boucharens, BioAscent’s Chief Operating Officer and Co-founder, said: “BioAscent is delighted to be continuing its involvement in European Lead Factory through the ESCulab project by providing outstanding compound management capability and adding the hit characterisation expertise developed for European Lead Factory to the BioAscent offering. We look forward to continuing the close collaborations we developed with the existing European Lead Factory partners and complementing those with the new participants and partners to help this consortium generate opportunities for new medicines and ultimately benefits for patients.”

The European Lead Factory combines the large high-quality compound libraries derived from the pharmaceutical industry and the Public Compound Collection and Europe’s leading screening facility with the innovative targets held by academic organisations in a public-private partnership. This offers an ideal platform to translate early-stage fundamental biological research into credible and investable starting points for drug discovery campaigns.

Over the next five years, the European Lead Factory will initiate 185 new drug discovery projects by screening medically relevant drug targets from European researchers, small and medium-sized enterprises and pharmaceutical industry against the European Lead Factory library of 550,000 unique chemical compounds.