This first year was focused on establishing the research infrastructure and laying the foundation for the following years. We set up the basic administrative functions and recruited most of the key staff members.

We evaluated and selected the European Chemical Biology Database(ECBD), which will be situated at the Institute of Molecular Genetics (IMG) in Prague. We also started working on a draft contract, which allows chemists to donate compounds to EU-OPENSCREEN in exchange of having access to biological data for their molecules. In collaboration with five computational chemistry groups from Germany, Spain, Finland and the Czech Republic, progress was made in the selection of the commercial library of 100,000 compounds. We also finalized our discussions with several vendors for compound management equipment such as storage and liquid handling instruments, and designed a plan for the facility.

Most notably, as coordinator of the EU-OPENSCREEN DRIVE project, we will collaborate with 33 partners on novel services such as fragment screening and chemoproteomics as well as on extending our European and global network. The full report is available here.