Ensuring long-term sustainability of excellence in chemical biology within Europe and beyond’ — ‘EU-OPENSCREEN-DRIVE

EU-OPENSCREEN (EU-OS), the European Research Infrastructure of Open Screening Platforms for Chemical Biology, builds a distributed organization of national screening and chemistry facilities, a common database, and a central headquarter that manages the joint compound collection and coordinates project flow and training. It provides world-class services to academia and industry in the fields of small molecule screening and medicinal chemistry. EU-OS developed its concept and business plan during the preparatory phase and has received information on the Commission Implementing Decision on setting up the EU-OS European Research Infrastructure Consortium (EU-OS-ERIC) in March 2018. In 2018, EU-OS will start its ERIC operations with seven founding members and one observer. EU-OS will promote the rich chemical knowledge of Europe and enabling systematic studies of the bioactivities of a larger collection of compounds leading to ground-breaking insights into cellular and organismal metabolic or signalling pathways. After careful consideration of IPR from all stakeholders involved, all results will eventually become available to the public. EU-OS will thereby also play an increasingly important role in facilitating the drug discovery process in Europe. In addition, it also has a great potential for innovative development of biomarkers and other diagnostics. By carefully considering the recommendations of the Longterm Sustainability Action Plan of the EC and ESFRI, EU-OS will utilize EU-OS-DRIVE to specifically promote measures for i) widening awareness of academia and industry for its services and data, ii) growing capacity and competence in its field across Europe, and iii) completing the management processes needed for a large distributed infrastructure. EU-OS-DRIVE will further help the EU-OS-ERIC to deliver its added-value via constant re-use of generated data and tools by users across the globe and to support the competitiveness of European life science industries.