PIVOT PARK SCREENING CENTRE BV

Their core work

Pivot Park Screening Centre (PPSC) is a contract research organization in Oss, Netherlands, that runs industrial-scale high-throughput screening (HTS) for drug discovery. They operate compound libraries and automated assay platforms that let academic groups, biotechs, and pharma companies test hundreds of thousands of molecules against a disease target to find early drug candidates (hits). The centre grew out of MSD/Organon's former screening infrastructure and offers services that most academic labs cannot replicate in-house — fully automated liquid handling, curated compound collections, and assay development. Their value is turning a biological target into a tractable chemical starting point.

What they specialise in

How they've shifted over time

With only two H2020 projects both starting in 2018, there is no long-term evolution to trace — PPSC entered Horizon 2020 late and in a focused way. Both engagements are consistent with their core identity as a screening service provider: one applied (TAPAS, thrombosis drug targets) and one infrastructure (ESCulab, building a pan-European screening resource). The direction of travel points toward positioning as open-access European screening infrastructure rather than one-off project partnerships.

They are moving from being one vendor among many toward being embedded in EU-backed open screening infrastructure, which makes them increasingly attractive for academic collaborations that need industrial-grade screening.

How they like to work

PPSC joins consortia as a specialist service partner, never as coordinator — consistent with a contract research business model where they bring a specific capability rather than lead scientific agendas. The ESCulab project alone connected them to 29 partners across 11 countries, showing a hub-style network reach concentrated in a single large infrastructure project. They are best engaged when a consortium needs concrete screening capacity, not when it needs scientific leadership.

Through two projects they built links to 29 partners across 11 European countries, with the bulk of that network coming from the ESCulab screening-infrastructure consortium. The reach is European rather than purely regional.

What sets them apart

Few organizations in Europe can offer industrial-grade high-throughput screening to academic and public partners — most equivalent facilities sit inside big pharma and are closed. PPSC inherited pharma-quality infrastructure (the former Organon/MSD screening operation) and repurposed it for open collaboration, which is structurally rare. For a consortium that needs to screen a large compound library against a novel target, PPSC is one of a small handful of viable partners on the continent.

Highlights from their portfolio

• ESCulab
  A EUR 7.1M Research and Innovation Action to build a European Screening Centre with a unique compound library — directly leverages PPSC's core infrastructure on a continental scale.
• TAPAS
  MSCA-ITN training network applying screening expertise to thrombosis drug targets — shows PPSC's willingness to host and train early-stage researchers alongside service delivery.