The drug discovery portal: a computational platform for identifying drug leads from academia

The Drug Discovery Portal (DDP) is a research initiative based at the University of Strathclyde in Glasgow, Scotland. It was initiated in 2007 by a group of researchers with expertise in virtual screening. Academic research groups in the university working in drug discovery programmes estimated there was a historical collection of physical compounds going back 50 years that had never been adequately catalogued. This invaluable resource has been harnessed to form the basis of the DDP library, and has attracted a high-percentage uptake from universities and research groups internationally. Its unique attributes include the diversity of the academic database, sourced from synthetic, medicinal and phytochemists working in academic laboratories and the ability to link biologists with appropriate chemical expertise through a target-matching virtual screening approach, and it has resulted in seven emerging hit development programmes between international contributors.