“It started as an experiment…”
Speakers highlight ELF as key player in collaborative drug discovery
The ELF Stakeholder Meeting brought together more than 90 participants from 60 different organisations, based in 14 different countries, reflecting the European aspect of ELF. The participants represent a broad group of involved stakeholders, ranging from policy and science to business and healthcare. An enthusiastic audience joined for more than ten presentations, discussions and multiple opportunities to network with programme owners and other experts.
Dimitrios Tzalis (ELF Head of Chemistry) and Ton Rijnders (ELF Head of Screening) kicked off the Stakeholder Meeting. They introduced the European Lead Factory as a real pioneer in collaborative drug discovery. When ELF started recruiting the initial screening programmes, the concept was new to the community and questions were raised whether it could deliver on its promises. Dimitrios and Ton showed how ELF has now become a powerful drug discovery engine, by visualising the astonishing results and impact achieved in the past five years. Ton Rijnders: “It started as an experiment, that would be characterized by shared use of compound collections, crowdsourcing innovations, creating partnerships and generating value. Now I dare to say, when looking at these four items: we can successfully tick off all those boxes.”
Dimitrios Tzalis said: “Globally there are many unmet medical needs that have to be addressed for patients in need. The primary goal of ELF is to deliver hit compounds that in turn can be translated into patents and drug candidates with the ultimate goal in mind to improve patients’ lives. ELF is a very good instrument to address this challenge, due to the fact that it provides the early drug discovery community with the resources required to identify and move potential drug candidates faster to the clinic".