Associations on the Fly, a new feature aiming to facilitate exploration of the Open Targets Platform evidence

Abstract

The Open Targets Platform (https://platform.opentargets.org) is a unique, comprehensive, open-source resource supporting systematic identification and prioritisation of targets for drug discovery. The Platform combines, harmonises and integrates data from >20 diverse sources to provide target-disease associations, covering evidence derived from genetic associations, somatic mutations, known drugs, differential expression, animal models, pathways and systems biology. An in-house target identification scoring framework weighs the evidence from each data source and type, contributing to an overall score for each of the 7.8M target-disease associations. However, the previous infrastructure did not allow user-led dynamic adjustments in the contribution of different evidence types for target prioritisation, a limitation frequently raised by our user community. Furthermore, the previous Platform user interface did not support navigation and exploration of the underlying target-disease evidence on the same page, occasionally making the user journey counterintuitive. Here, we describe Associations on the Fly (AOTF), a new Platform feature - developed as part of a wider product refactoring project - to enable formulation of more flexible and impactful therapeutic hypotheses through dynamic adjustment of the weight of contributing evidence from each source, altering the prioritisation of targets.