We have just released the latest version of the Open Targets Platform, release 18.02. These are some of the highlights.

Our favourite stats

The hallmarks of cancer

We know an awful lot about cancer.
We know that cancer is a disease with dynamic changes in the genome.
We know that these changes can lead to dominant gain of function in oncogenes, and recessive loss of function in tumour suppressor genes.
And we also know which biological capabilities (or hallmarks of cancer) are required for a tumour to develop.

The first six hallmarks were described by Hanahan and Weinberg almost two decades ago. This is how the hallmarks were depicted then:

We are extremely excited to announce that we now include these biological capabilities in our Platform, plus the new traits from Hallmarks of cancer: the next generation).

Why not head to our Open Targets Platform and search for TP53 for example?

You will learn that the TP53 protein can promote the suppression of growth and suppress the escaping immunic response to cancer.

No wonder TP53 is regarded as the "guardian of the genome".

We have hallmarks for 226 targets from the Cancer Gene Census, and this number will rise as our collaboration with COSMIC continues going from strength to strength.

Chips and more chips

Chips are a UI component to help represent complex entities in small blocks, or tags. We now display these tags to assist you to sift through all the literature available in our Bibliography sections.

In addition to Genes, you can sort the literature according to:

• Concepts
• Diseases
• Drugs
• Journal
• Authors

Try mixing and matching different entities and removing a few chips to discovery how powerful our Bibliography section has become.

And if you wonder where these papers come from, wonder no longer. LINK is the answer.

Association studies with targeted arrays

Did you know that there is a lot of papers out there describing genetic associations that are not based on genome-wide arrays?

And that we have hardly tapped into these non-genome-wide studies?
Until now.

In this release, we include variants from targeted arrays (also known as focused genotyping studies), where only specific sets of variants (e.g. SNPs) are genotyped.

Check our evidence for SH2B3 in diastolic blood pressure to find the targeted study (PMID:27618452) that has now be curated for rs3184504.

You will see more of these targeted studies in our future releases as we continue our curation effort with the NHGRI-EBI GWAS catalog.

New YouTube channel

Did you know that we had a few tutorials and animations to highlight features of the Open Targets Platform?

That's right. If you have not seen them yet, head to our Open Targets YouTube channel and take your pick.

Do you have an idea on the features we should highlight in our next recordings? Email us with your suggestions.