EU-OPENSCREEN is a partner in the EUROCOVID proposal

EU-OPENSCREEN is a partner in the recently submitted EUROCOVID “EUROpean COoperation for anti-VIral Drug discovery and preparedness for current and emerging coronavirus outbreaks” Horizon 2020 proposal.

The EUROCOVID consortium brings together a well-integrated network of (public/private) EU experts in antiviral drug-discovery for the development of pan-coronavirus antivirals that can rapidly respond to the current SARS-CoV2 outbreak and to future related outbreaks or mutations leading to drug-resistance.

EUROCOVID aims to pursue two different objectives at the same time:

a rationale fast-track drug repurposing to identify in a timeframe of only 1.5 years a drug to be progressed into Phase IIa/IIb studies;
a drug discovery effort to discover new broad-spectrum antivirals aspreclinical candidates for immediately initiating prophylactic and therapeutic treatments duringthe current outbreak or future outbreaks, including the development of drug-resistant mutations.

If the project is successful, EU-OPENSCREEN will provide access to the small molecules in our EUROPEAN CHEMICAL BIOLOGY LIBRARY (ECBL) through screening campaigns in our partner sites at the HZI in Braunschweig and the University of Santiago de Compostela.

We will also participate in creating an inventory of the chemical screening collections from project partners, and work on plans for testing, follow-up and shipment to partner screening laboratories.

Furthermore, we will help to set up a data repository for all chemicals and screening results, creating unique identifiers and incorporating these data into the chemical biology database (ECBD) for open and rapid access to all partners.

Finally, EU-OPENSCREEN will support the registration, quality control and logistics of all newly synthesized compounds in the project.