CPCChemical Probe Consortium

The Chemical Probe Consortium (CPC) aims to provide an infrastructure to the Dutch life sciences community that is currently missing in order to help them validate protein targets in disease models with the use of chemical probes. It is difficult to overstate the impact of chemical probes in biomedical research. Bibliometric evidence shows that chemical probes (e.g. small molecule pharmacological modulators) have both the greatest scientific citation impact, the greatest sway on exploratory biomedical research, and provide the best mechanism to understand the relevance of a protein as a potential drug target. As such they can form a starting point for drug development efforts. With the advancement of –OMICs technologies the number of potential drug targets is larger than ever before. To determine protein target druggability, chemical probes are needed. CPC will offer Dutch researchers assisted access to the required infrastructure (in vitro and cell-based screening and validation equipment), and create data collections that will be integrated with world-wide open-access databases (e.g. CHEMBL, Protein Database, Drugbank, etc). Artificial Intelligence (AI) techniques will be applied to predict biological activity, to guide data interpretation, to steer Structure Activity Relation (SAR) exploration and medicinal chemistry, and to predict most effective synthetic routes for probe development. Specifically, the use of AI will allow the exploration of chemical space previously unexplored in literature and will assist in identification of highly selective compounds. CPC will also store screening collections (both physical and a virtual compound library that is orders of magnitude larger), in order to facilitate all aspects of chemical probe development.