Open Targets Platform: release 19.04 is out

April was an exciting month here at Open Targets.

Following the Nature publication of one of the very first Open Targets experimental projects, we now celebrate a new release of the Open Targets Platform.

In this new release we have:

• Crisp CRISPR data from our recent research paper in Oncology
• New safety data manually curated from three publications
• Novel evidence for target-disease associations

These are the stats for the latest release, 19.04:

Crisp CRISPR

You may have seen Prioritization of cancer therapeutic targets using CRISPR-Cas9 screens, where we integrated gene fitness effects with target tractability data and genomic biomarkers (i.e. cancer driver events) for a systematic prioritisation of targets in defined tissues and genotypes.

Straight from this Nature paper, we now use CRISPR to associate targets with diseases, for example, as evidence for WRN in colorectal carcinoma.

The new CRISPR data is available for 624 genes e.g. RHBDF1, in 19 cancer types, and results in 1,846 target-disease associations, some never identified before!

How do we score CRISPR evidence and the associations resulting from it?
Head to Computing the association score help page and find out.

New safety data

One of the reasons for the abysmal failure in drug discovery and development is that drugs are simply not safe.

The Open Targets Platform can be (and has been) used in pre-clinical stages of drug discovery research, as we already integrate data of mouse phenotypes to assess possible safety concerns.

We are excited to say that we now have a brand new section in the target profile page that summarises toxic effects if/when modulating a given target. You will find:

• Main organs and systems affected
• Agonism or activation effects
• Antagonism or inhibition effects
• Publications

AR is one of the targets that we now have target safety effects for.

This data is a compilation of manual curation of three publications, all linking adverse and toxic effects to 144 targets.

Although these adverse effects are very well known within the pharma industry, the data was dispersed elsewhere, until now.

Novel evidence

As part of our bimonthly release cycle, we always have brand new evidence from a variety of data sources to reveal novel associations or strengthen existing ones.

Some of the latest examples are:

• rs113252371, a common variant curated by GWAS catalog as evidence for ITGAL in eosinophil count

• rs143718918, a rare missense variant curated by UniProt as evidence for ABCA7 in Alzheimer's disease

These are the highlights for now; our next release is at the end of June.

In the meantime, send your comments and questions our way, or join the Open Targets community on Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter.

Why not check What's new in our 19.04 release on YouTube? In takes only 70 seconds to navigate through the new CRISPR and target safety data in the Open Targets Platform.