The Joint European Compound Library: boosting precompetitive research

• Published in: Drug discovery today Vol. 20; no. 2; pp. 181 - 186
• Main Authors: Besnard, Jérémy, Jones, Philip S., Hopkins, Andrew L., Pannifer, Andrew D.
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: England Elsevier Ltd 01-02-2015
• Subjects: Biomedical Research; Drug Discovery; Drug Industry; Europe; High-Throughput Screening Assays; Small Molecule Libraries; Europe
• ISSN: 1359-6446; 1878-5832
• DOI: 10.1016/j.drudis.2014.08.014

•New high-throughput screening collection now available at no cost for academic groups and SMEs.•Compounds contributed by seven European pharma companies.•Diverse origins of compounds generates a diverse screening collection.•Subsets from different companies show very little overlap in chemical space.•Compounds are predicted to show activity in a diverse array of biological targets.
The Joint European Compound Library (JECL) is a new high-throughput screening collection aimed at driving precompetitive drug discovery and target validation. The JECL has been established with a core of over 321000 compounds from the proprietary collections of seven pharmaceutical companies and will expand to around 500000 compounds. Here, we analyse the physicochemical profile and chemical diversity of the core collection, showing that the collection is diverse and has a broad spectrum of predicted biological activity. We also describe a model for sharing compound information from multiple proprietary collections, enabling diversity and quality analysis without disclosing structures. The JECL is available for screening at no cost to European academic laboratories and SMEs through the IMI European Lead Factory (http://www.europeanleadfactory.eu/).