When developing new medicines, scientists need to understand the underlying causes of disease. To do that, they need to be able to study in detail the role of the different proteins involved in the disease. However, that requires chemical compounds capable of altering or blocking the action of individual proteins.

The goal of EUbOPEN is to develop high quality chemical tool compounds for 1 000 human proteins. This represents around a third of the ‘druggable’ proteins in the human body. The project will test the new tools in the areas of immunology, oncology and neuroscience.

The project will make the tools, plus the accompanying data and protocols, openly available to the entire research community without restrictions on use.

By the end of the project, the EUbOPEN team will have created the largest and most deeply characterised collection of chemical modulators of protein function that is also openly accessible. Researchers in academia and industry alike will therefore be able to use the tools to study diseases, and identify proteins that play a key role in disease development and so could be targeted by drugs. The tools will also help scientists to design drugs capable of blocking specific proteins involved in diseases.