p>The European Lead Factory has just announced that an additional 50,000 new compounds have been added to their screening collection. This brings the collection up to 350,000 compounds and sets them well on the way to their 500,000 target.

I've been involved in a couple of projects that have made use of this high-throughput screening facility and I've been impressed with the quality and diversity of the hits generated.

The European Lead Factory was established to promote the discovery of novel lead compounds, suitable for subsequent optimization either to drug candidates or to high‐quality pharmacological tools for the experimental validation of targets.

If you have a target you want to screen against you can submit a proposal online. For an academic or small company this is an interesting way to identify novel starting points for a medicinal chemistry program.