Open Targets

Overview

Founded in 2014, Open Targets is an innovative public-private partnership that uses human genetics and genomics data for systematic drug target identification and prioritisation. Our partner institutions contribute their world-class scientific expertise and translational insight into collaborative projects within the consortium. Together, we provide a research and development framework that applies to all aspects of human disease with the goal of improving the success rate of discovering new medicines.

Open Targets offers an early assessment of the expected efficacy of a therapeutic intervention for a given drug target, with the aim of improving the almost 90 per cent failure rate of drug discovery efforts in clinical trials. The extensive programme of experimental and informatics projects uses large-scale experiments, analysis, and cutting edge informatics technologies to provide a more complete understanding of the biological drug target. Our projects are designed to identify causal links between targets and disease in three focus areas: oncology, neurodegeneration, and immunology and inflammation, as well as provide disease agnostic informatics frameworks for target identification and prioritisation.

Our research projects have made significant contributions to understanding the relationships between targets and diseases, presented in our series of high-impact research publications.

Details on our resources can be found on our website.

Andrew Hercules

The Open Targets knowledge cycle, showing how the generation of data in our experimental programme feeds into the data data integration tools developed in our informatics programme. Created by Andrew Hercules.