The DDCB platform has strong ties to similar research infrastructures in other Nordic countries so that expertise and access to technologies are shared among the countries. These collaborations allow researchers in Finland access to specialized chemical biology technologies that exist in other Nordic countries but not in Finland, and vice versa. Sharing compound acquisitions to access more and diverse chemical collections and sharing knowledge between the infrastructures are examples of our Nordic collaborations.
Our platform is directly linked to two emerging ESFRI roadmap initiatives: EU-OPENSCREEN and EATRIS as well as several other international networks.
The DDCB serves as the Finnish National ESFRI Node of the European infrastructure EU-OPENSCREEN ERIC - the European infrastructure of open screening platforms for chemical biology, which is on the FIRI Roadmap 2021-2024. EU-OPENSCREEN obtained ERIC legal status in 2018 (classified as ESFRI landmark in Strategy Report on Research Infrastructures Roadmap 2018) and aims to provide services to develop novel chemical research ‘tools’ for all fields of the Life Sciences (incl. molecular, cell, plant, structural and microbiology; synthetic and medicinal chemistry; pharmacology and early drug discovery etc.). Within EU-OPENSCREEN, the FIMM High Throughput Biomedicine Unit is nominated high-capacity screening partner site and the Faculty of Pharmacy Unit a specialized screening partner site. Finland joined EU-OPENSCREEN as a founding member, and University of Helsinki and HiLIFE host the national node of this ESFRI. The services by EU-OPENSCREEN ERIC will add an international large-scale level to the chemical biology and drug discovery activities.
The services of DDCB and the European scale infrastructures are highly complementary. Importantly, for users in Finland, the assay development and pilot scale screening advice and operations provided by DDCB are expected to be critically important. These functions will help Finnish researchers to provide competitive proposals and following access to the high-level and often large-scale services of the EU-OPENSCREEN ERIC, complementary to DDCB services. As high-capacity screening site, the FIMM High Throughput Biomedicine Unit is hosting one copy of the EU-OPENSCREEN compound collection, comprising 100 000 commercial compounds and up to 40 000 academic compounds, collected from the academic chemistry groups in Europe. Through DDCB’s strong link to EU-OPENSCREEN, the chemists in Finland will have enhanced and facilitated opportunities to provide their compounds to the EU-OPENSCREEN compound collection and have them bioprofiled and screened in various user projects free-of-charge.