Participate
As a biologist with a robust and suitable assay, you are invited to collaboratively develop a chemical tool compound for your target of interest. Your assay will be screened with the whole European Chemical Biology Library (ECBL) in one of our 22 screening facilities across Europe and the data will be made available to the broader scientific community through our open access European Chemical Biology Database (ECBD).
In collaboration with our medicinal chemistry groups, identified active compounds (‘hits’) can be chemically optimised further and translated into valuable tool compounds.
You can submit your project idea to the EU-OPENSCREEN project management team via the dedicated Contact Form. We will evaluate the suitability of your request to our services and contact you to complete a full application form by connecting to the ARIA online submission platform. Guidelines on how to complete the online application form are available here.
Applications for access can be submitted at any time and will be evaluated on a rolling basis.
For further information and support in the application process please contact us at scientific-projects@eu-openscreen.eu.
Your submitted proposal will undergo a two-step evaluation procedure:
Please notice that the application will remain strictly confidential throughout the review process as reviewers are bound by a non-disclosure agreement.
If your proposal is not complete and/ or it does not pass the minimum threshold/ criteria for acceptance, you will be asked to amend your proposal accordingly to the reviewer’s comments and re-submit your project.
If your proposal is positively evaluated, the EU-OPENSCREEN project management team will circulate it to the partner sites selected and/ or matching the service/ technology requested for the proposed research. At this stage, each contacted partner site will consider the project feasibility (i.e. robustness of the assay, maturity of the assay, other pre-requisites, if applicable) and prepare a cost estimation for the proposed research. The EU-OPENSCREEN team will then put you in contact with the partner sites of interest for further discussions on the project implementation (i.e.IP rights, costs, timelines etc).
A compound replenishment fee will apply for the usage of the European Chemical Biology Library (ECBL). The replenishment fee is established as follows:
The compound replenishment fee will apply for the usage of the full set of the high-throughput screening (HTS) library (~95,000 commercial small molecules), while approx. 5,000 small molecules of the pilot library, containing 2,464 bioactive compounds and 2,464 HTS-representative compounds, are provided free-of-charge.
EU-OPENSCREEN ERIC does not provide funding for the services offered by the partners sites. These costs (e.g. personnel, machine time, consumables, labware etc) are discussed with the relevant partner site and depend on the complexity and duration of the project. Please get in touch with us at scientific-projects@eu-openscreen.eu for grant writing support and/ or help with funding opportunities or have a look at presently available project funding offered via EU-projects here
Once you have selected the preferred partner site, a written project agreement between you and the site has to be signed. The agreement regulates the usage of the ECBL, IP rights, acknowledgments etc. You will be also asked to prepare together with the partner site a project workplan indicating main project milestones and timeline
Please notice that, following an embargo period of up to three years, all primary screening data will be made publicly available through the ECBD for its rapid and safe dissemination and exploitation. Read more about our open access policy here.
To ensure that data produced at different sites are comparable and reproducible, a set of common operational standards for the EU-OPENSCREEN screening sites have been defined and can be downloaded here.