Hi all! I posted a few weeks ago about the Therapeutic Target Database, which shows associations between gene targets and compounds, with links out to the source papers to let you assess the strength of the evidence.
Today I wanted to spotlight another good dataset, which is Open Targets https://platform.opentargets.org/. This is primarily used to associate targets with diseases, and has a really clear interface for viewing the strength and type of association.
For example, the screenshot below shows the page for LRRK2. Each row is a different disease term, with diseases sorted by genetic association score (highest to lowest). Association scores are shown using a heatmap, with stronger blue indicating a stronger association. Genetic association is the leftmost column, with heatmap squares instead of circles. The highest association for LRRK2 is “Hereditary late-onset Parkinson disease”, followed by “Parkinson disease”, then “Young adult-onset Parkinsonism”.
The genetic association scores are very useful for my work, but I also like that you can see assocation scores from other sources and types of data, including ClinVar, Orphanet, and Uniprot literature, in the other columns.
Open Targets can also use disease as the starting point. The screenshot below is for Parkinson disease, showing there is detailed data in the domains of Drugs and Clinical Candidates, Clinical signs and symptoms, GWAS, and others.
Under Drugs and Clinical Candidates, you can see a nice timeline view of how far progressed a given compound is in the path to approval.
As with the Therapeutic Target Database, the data backing Open Targets can be downloaded and integrated into your own systems. For browsing a specific target, the web interface is nice and friendly, but bulk download is more efficient if you will be making many queries.
Hope this dataset proves useful in your work!