EUbOPEN consortium will provide tools to unlock disease biology

8 June, Cambridge – Almost twenty years after deciphering the human genome, our understanding of human disease is still far from complete. Some of the most powerful and versatile tools to better understand biology and disease-relevant processes are well-characterised small chemical modulators of protein function.

The new EUbOPEN consortium aims to develop high quality chemical tool compounds for 1000 proteins (one third of the druggable proteins in the human body). It will enable unencumbered access to these research tools, thereby empowering academia and industry alike to explore disease biology and unlock the discovery of new drug targets and treatments.

Goethe University Frankfurt and Boehringer Ingelheim are jointly leading the EUbOPEN consortium. EMBL-EBI is one of the 22 partners, with the Chemistry services team providing informatics infrastructure for the project.

“As our knowledge of the genome advances, we need a new suite of tools to help us better understand what is happening at molecular level,” says Andrew Leach, Head of Chemistry Services at EMBL-EBI. “Through open science and extensive collaborations, we aim to deliver new tools and capabilities that the entire scientific community can use to advance our knowledge even further.”

The generation and dissemination of high-quality and well-characterized research tools for a substantial fraction of the druggable human genome are the major goals of the newly formed public-private partnership called Enabling and Unlocking biology in the OPEN (EUbOPEN).

This large consortium of partners from academia and industry was launched on 1 May 2020, with a total budget of 65.8 million euros covered by a grant from the Innovative Medicines Initiative (IMI) and cash/in-kind contributions from EFPIA companies, IMI Associated Partners and non-EU partners.

‘EUbOPEN will provide the wider academic community with unencumbered access to the highest quality pharmacological tool compounds for a large number of novel targets, and seed a massive community target prioritisation and deconvolution effort. The expected impact should be transformative’, says Project Leader Adrian J. Carter from Boehringer Ingelheim.