In the morning of November 10, 2019, Professor Hongkui Deng, Director of Stem Cell Research Center and Chairman of Department of Cell Biology, Faculty of Medicine, Peking University, visited the Chinese National Compound Library (CNCL). He was warmly received by his old friends, Drs. Ming-Wei Wang (Director of the National Center for Drug Screening/CNCL and Dean of School of Pharmacy, Fudan University) and Dehua Yang (Professor, Shanghai Institute of Materia Medica, Chinese Academy of Sciences). They briefed each other of their respective research directions and technical capabilities, exchanged common interests, and decided to immediately initiate a project to tackle some key problems, thereby forging a substantive collaboration in drug discovery.