Taros achieved ELF milestone

Taros Chemicals, a privately owned CRO focused on serving the needs of pharmaceutical, chemical, agrochemical and biotech companies, announced that in November this year, it achieved the benchmark of the delivery of 30,000 unprecedented chemical compounds to be used for high throughput screening within the unique Joint European Compound Library (JECL), part of the European Lead Factory (ELF).

Taros Chemicals, a leading European custom research and manufacturing organization announced it is robustly progressing through year 4 of the 5 years’ ELF project duration.

With over 30,000 compounds delivered into the Joint European Compound Library by January 2017, Taros is currently leading the SME contribution of novel screening compounds to the ELF collection.

A distinctive characteristic of the Taros’ screening compounds is its high level of structural complexity and three-dimensionality, two features that are regarded as attractive in drug discovery application. Taros Chemicals takes the challenge to design and synthesize unprecedented spiro, bridge and fused polycycles with different degrees of saturation, conjugation and substitution patterns. The finalized scaffolds with high three-dimensional character provide versatile starting points and ample opportunities for further chemical exploration and growth during the hit-to-lead phase.

The  European Lead Factory (ELF) [current publication, PDF, co-authored by Dr. Dimitrios Tzalis, Taros] initiated in January 2013, is a €196 million Public Private Partnership (PPP) suppoted by the Innovative Medicines Initiative (IMI) and is aimed at boosting the initial phases of the drug discovery process. Pharmaceutical companies, academic groups and five Discovery small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) have formed a pan-European consortium to address the challenge of delivering an innovative, publicly-accessible, screening deck of synthetically-tractable compounds, named the Public Compound Collection (PCC). As part of the ELF, the seven participating pharmaceutical companies have contributed over 300,000 chemical compounds from their corporate chemical collections and the academic and SME members will deliver up to 200,000 compounds from unprecedented areas of biologically-relevant chemical space.