EU-OPENSCREEN and Open Data

Most Life Science researchers do not have easy access to suitable drug screening platforms and compound collections which are generally expensive to purchase and maintain and require specialist expertise for operation. This often represents a major limitation in the field of chemical tool development in academia and slows down innovative drug discovery projects. With the aim to address these needs, researchers from more than 20 academic institutes in Europe have joined forces to launch EU-OPENSCREEN in 2018. Under the legal entity of an ERIC (European Research Infrastructure Consortium), this new organization is designed for long-term scientific and financial sustainability and is open to collaborations with academic and industry scientists from all over the world. It offers access to a wide range of screening platforms for biochemical, biophysical and cellular screening, commercial and academic compound libraries, and medicinal chemistry expertise. One of our founding principles is to provide all our high-quality screening data in our open-access European Chemical Biology Database (ECBD) that is based on the FAIR principles. Along these lines we created a large solubility data set from our rationally selected collection of 100.000 commercial compounds. To harness the value of this data set, we ran a data mining competition together with the SLAS on the Kaggle platform where 100 teams participated to develop accurate prediction methods for such data sets.