Open Targets Platform 22.02 has been released!

The latest release of the Platform — 22.02 — is now available at platform.opentargets.org.



Key points



Key stats

Metric Count
Targets 61,524, of which 29,186 are associated with at least one disease
Diseases 18,468, of which 13,768 are associated with at least one target
Drugs 12,594
Evidence strings 10,880,832 (see the Community for a breakdown by datasource)
Associations 7,980,448, of which 2,230,103 are direct associations




New terminology for Gene2Phenotype

Gene2Phenotype has updated their confidence value terms, in line with the new terminology established by the Gene Curation Coalition (GenCC).

The GenCC provides information pertaining to the validity of gene-disease relationships. They have harmonised the terms and definitions describing the level of evidence for a gene’s role in disease. This work is described in their recent preprint.

In the Platform, the following terms have been updated:

Previous G2P term New G2P term
Confirmed Definitive
Possible Limited
Probable Strong


More details on the updated terminology, as well as the confidence value term definitions, is available from Gene2Phenotype.

We have also updated our scoring to reflect the changes.



Data updates

This release integrates new data from almost all of our providers. In particular, Chemical Probes has been updated from Probes&Drugs v04.2021, and data from the International Mouse Phenotypes Consortium has been updated, affecting both Phenodigm and the mouse phenotypes datasets.

Of note, EPMC evidence has not been updated since our last release, but the number of evidence strings has increased because the co-occurrences have been grounded to the newer drug, target, and disease indexes.



Open Targets Genetics

Version 7 of the Open Targets Genetics portal was released last week. It included new GWAS and pQTL associations.

We have integrated the updated data into the Open Targets Platform, revealing some novel associations (e.g. TET2 and primary biliary cirrhosis), and strengthening some known ones (e.g. SNCA and Parkinson's disease).

New evidence from Open Targets Genetics enables the Platform to feature a new association between TET2 and primary biliary cirrhosis (22.02 release)
Additional evidence from Open Targets Genetics strengthens the association between SNCA and Parkinson's disease (22.02 release)


ChEMBL

This release features more than 7,600 target-disease evidence strings, aggregating data from more than 1,450 new clinical trials.

This has allowed us to feature some new associations, such as the association between TLR9 and Graves ophthalmopathy. This association was not previously reported in the Platform but was established by a new study from the National Taiwan University Hospital (NCT05126147).

ChEMBL evidence for the association of TLR9 and Graves ophthalmopathy, a new association in the Platform (22.02 release)


A note on data availability

Did you know? As part of our work to make the Open Targets Platform data more widely accessible, we have also made it available through Amazon Web Services: https://registry.opendata.aws/opentargets/



Deprecation of the Open Targets Covid-19 Target Prioritisation Tool

The Open Targets Covid-19 tool — previously available at covid19.opentargets.org — has now been deprecated.

We have made the decision to deprecate the tool, as we have now integrated the information it contains directly into the Open Targets Platform. You can explore targets associated with COVID-19, and explore available information on COVID-19 such as drugs approved or under investigation to treat the disease.

Targets associated with Covid-19 in the Open Targets Platform (22.02 release)
Summary widgets on the Open Targets Platform's COVID-19 profile page (22.02 release)


The tool was created to bring together key sources of information and to enable users to explore host and viral targets, and potential treatments for Covid-19. We integrated a number of key public datasets and publications, but designed the tool to be complementary to other resources, such as the Open Targets Platform, Uniprot, or EuropePMC. Read more about how and why we developed the tool in our release post.

The archived codebases are available in our GitHub archive.



What do you think of our updates? Let us know on the Open Targets Community or on Twitter.