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

Abstract

Motivation: 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 old 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.

Results: Here, we describe "Associations on the Fly" (AOTF), a new Platform feature-developed with a user-centred vision-that enables the user to formulate more flexible therapeutic hypotheses through dynamic adjustment of the weight of contributing evidence from each source, altering the prioritisation of targets.

Availability and implementation: The codebases that power the Platform-including our pipelines, GraphQL API, and React UI-are all open source and licensed under the APACHE LICENSE, VERSION 2.0.You can find all of our code repositories on GitHub at https://github.com/opentargets and on Zenodo at https://zenodo.org/records/14392214.This tool was implemented using React v18 and its code is accessible here: [https://github.com/opentargets/ot-ui-apps].The tools are accessible through the Open Targets Platform web interface [https://platform.opentargets.org/] and GraphQL API (https://platform-docs.opentargets.org/data-access/graphql-api).Data is available for download here: [https://platform.opentargets.org/downloads] and from the EMBL-EBI FTP: [https://ftp.ebi.ac.uk/pub/databases/opentargets/platform/].

Contact: Annalisa Buniello, European Molecular Biology Laboratory (EMBL-EBI), buniello@ebi.ac.uk.

Supplementary information: Features walkthrough video: https://youtu.be/2A9bksboAag, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WQwQn6I4jkwExtensive documentation: https://platform-docs.opentargets.org/web-interface/associations-on-the-fly  https://platform-docs.opentargets.org/target-prioritisation.