The ELF Honest Data Broker: informatics enabling public-private collaboration in a precompetitive arena

New precompetitive ways of working in the pharmaceutical industry are driving the development of new informatics systems to enable their execution and management. The European Lead Factory (ELF) is a precompetitive, 30-partner collaboration between academic groups, small-medium enterprises and pharmaceutical companies created to discover small molecule hits against novel biological targets. A unique HTS screening and triage workflow has been developed to balance the intellectual property and scientific requirements of all the partners. Here, we describe the ELF Honest Data Broker, a cloud-based informatics system providing the scientific triage tools, fine-grained permissions and management tools required to implement the workflow.