Openly available chemical tools may speed up development of needed medicines | News | CORDIS | European Commission

"What happens when industry and academia join forces for the good of science? They launch an open access website that helps researchers to discover new medical treatments.

Chemical probes are important tools in drug discovery research. Chemical biologists frequently use these small molecules to study or manipulate biological systems such as cells and organisms. Although the pharmaceutical industry has generated many high-quality probes, related data is often missing or misleading. This absence of trustworthy data is an obstacle for researchers deciding on which chemical tools to use in their search for new treatments. To address this lack in accessible knowledge, a group of pharmaceutical companies, universities, hospitals and research organisations joined forces to make a large number of innovative probes and their associated data available to the research community. With partial funding from the EU through the ULTRA-DD project, the partners have launched a website called ‘Open Science Probes’. The site provides information on a unique collection of probes with their related data and control compounds. It also offers information on how to use the molecules and a way to order them. The chemical tools and target-related knowledge made available are described in an article published on the eLife platform...."