Brief CV: Philip is Director General of the of the EU-OPENSCREEN European Research Infrastructure for Chemical Biology and Screening in Berlin and Head of Discovery Research at the Fraunhofer Institute for Translational Medicine and Pharmacology in Hamburg, Germany and. He is involved in multiple national and European programs on both drug discovery and FAIR data strategies. Previously, Philip was Chief Scientific Officer of the European ScreeningPort GmbH, which provided drug discovery and translational research services. Between 2005 and 2007, Philip was a manager at GlaxoSmithKline, Stevenage, focussed on the development of enabling technologies for drug discovery and development. In the period 2000 to 2005 he was a Principle Scientist at Pfizer working across multiple therapeutic areas. Between 1995- 1999, Philip was at the University of Manchester studying molecular interactions governing the function of connective tissues. He received his PhD in Biophysics from Imperial College London in 1995 and has MSc and BSc degrees in Physics. Philip currently serves as the vice-president of the Society of Laboratory Automation Sciences (SLAS).
Abstract: The EU-OPENSCREEN (EU-OS) research infrastructure (RI) provides molecular screening and chemistry services across Europe to facilitate research in chemical biology and early drug discovery. EU-OS’s collection of compounds – the European Chemical Biology Library (ECBL) includes > 100,000 commercially sourced small molecules. Alongside, we provide access to an increasing number of academic compounds (>6,000) provided by our network of European and non-European based chemists. Users can access these libraries at our screening partner sites and identify potential biological effectors and modulators against their defined targets and/or in in-vitro phenotypic-based disease models. The primary screening hits provide the basis for further optimization of compounds at our medicinal chemistry sites towards potent, selective chemical probes or drug discovery leads. Additionally, a new European Fragment Screening Library (EFSL) (>1000 compounds) is available to facilitate biophysical-based hit-finding and optimization activities using direct substructural alignment with the large ECBL. In the presentation we will describe using project examples from our user community how these infrastructure resources are poised to significantly contribute to remove bottlenecks in early-phase drug discovery and accelerate the development of novel chemical probes in basic research across Europe.
