"The exchange was a highly valuable experience, both professionally and personally. It provided an excellent opportunity to learn from colleagues at CZ-OPENSCREEN, gain a new perspective on compound management and laboratory informatics, and strengthen relationships within the EU-OPENSCREEN community" - says Marcin Śleszyński.

A compound may physically move from storage into a screening project, but its identity, quality and associated information must remain accurate and traceable along the way. Managing that relationship effectively helps ensure that high-quality compound collections can be reliably used for drug discovery and screening. Keeping the two connected is part of Marcin Śleszyński’s work. 

As Compound Manager of the National Library of Chemical Compounds at our screening partner site, POL-OPENSCREEN, based at the Institute of Medical Biology of the Polish Academy of Sciences, Marcin oversees compounds from registration and storage through quality control and preparation for screening. What particularly interests him is finding ways to improve these processes through better data and automation. 

It was this aspect of his work that took Marcin to CZ-OPENSCREEN at the Institute of Molecular Genetics of the Czech Academy of Sciences for a week-long EU-OPENSCREEN staff exchange in July 2026. The Czech and Polish partner sites already have a long-standing relationship, but the visit offered the opportunity to experience first-hand how another facility manages large compound collections in its daily operations. 

Through job shadowing and hands-on training, he could follow these processes in practice rather than simply learn about them from a distance. One example of this integration was ScreenX, CZ-OPENSCREEN’s informatics platform. Marcin saw how the system connects multiple stages of compound management and screening within a single ecosystem. Instead of data management sitting separately from laboratory operations, ScreenX allows information to remain connected across different stages of the process, helping create a more integrated workflow. 

But one of Marcin’s most important observations at CZ-OPENSCREEN was to see scientists, compound management specialists and software developers working closely together. 

"What stood out to me was seeing how laboratory expertise and informatics can work together. Improving screening workflows is not only about laboratory processes or software, but about how these different elements come together." – he explains. 

Marcin returned to POL-OPENSCREEN with practical ideas for improving sample tracking and quality control and further developing its compound management workflows. For him, that exchange of operational knowledge does not end with the week in Prague. He hopes the long-standing relationship between POL-OPENSCREEN and CZ-OPENSCREEN will continue to provide opportunities to share expertise in compound management, automation and scientific informatics, and to strengthen cooperation across the wider EU-OPENSCREEN network.