Access Track 2:
Predictive systems pharmacology for safer drugs and chemical products

This Access Track invites life scientists, who make use of chemical compounds and their biological activity: for example, biologists interested in using chemical compounds as modulators/inhibitors to study their biological system or protein of interest; chemists interested in identifying the biological activities of their synthesized or isolated chemical compounds; structural biologists interested in the experimental validation of drug leads against a defined macromolecular target (e.g. protein) and/or in the determination of the molecular basis of structure-activity relationships of chemical compounds interacting with their cellular targets.

If you need integrated access to high-throughput compound screening, imaging, structural biology and systems biology modelling capabilities as well as comprehensive bioactivity datasets and mouse models, Access Track 2 is the right path for your project! The six biomedical research infrastructures EU-OPENSCREEN*, INSTRUCT, Euro-BioImaging, ELIXIR, Infrafrontier and ISBE can support you to develop chemical tool compounds, safer drugs and chemical products, such as crop-protective agents.

In case of questions please contact the Access Track leader Bahne Stechmann.

*Due to a high demand for projects involving EU-OPENSCREEN screening resources in the first submission rounds of the 2nd CORBEL Open Call, there are no capacities for additional EU-OPENSCREEN projects available in CORBEL anymore.

Exemplary service pipeline with consecutive access to different research infrastructures offered in Access Track 2

Example of an ongoing project:

Cystic Fibrosis

 

 

Prof. Margarida Amaral
Faculdade de Ciências da Universidade de Lisboa

"CORBEL is a great opportunity to carry out integrated work which can be performed in collaboration with several ESFRI (European Strategy Forum on Research Infrastructures) sites to generate unprecedented knowledge on one research topic."


Scientific interest:
My lab has a major focus on the molecular and cellular mechanisms of biogenesis, traffic and degradation of wild-type and mutant protein CFTR, which when mutated causes the genetic disease Cystic Fibrosis (CF). To understand CF mechanisms globally we use transcriptomics, proteomics and functional genomics (functional siRNA screens). Our results translate into the clinic for better CF diagnosis, prognosis and personalized therapies.

Work plan: We are studying, in collaboration with the Euro-BioImaging node at the EMBL Heidelberg, CFTR mutations that affect intracellular traffic and their functional implications which is the most common cause of CF. Using high throughput microscopy, we have performed a genome scale siRNA screen to identify putative drug targets. We will prioritize the obtained hits with ISBE partners in the Netherlands, who are building a dynamical network model of the CFTR trafficking pathways. We are collaborating with the ELIXIR hub EMBL-EBI in Hinxton/UK on target prediction models, which are trained on ChEMBL data to predict likely targets for novel compounds that have an effect on CF. Furthermore, we are exploring the possibility to work with the EU-OPENSCREEN site at the FMP Berlin to screen for novel chemical compounds that have an effect on the traffic and/or activity of mutant protein CFTR.