The Open Targets Platform

The Open Targets Platform integrates over 20 different public data sources, and uses this data to systematically build and score associations between drug targets and diseases.

Users investigating particular associations can rapidly sift through all the available evidence from genetic associations, somatic mutations, pathways and systems biology, RNA expression, animal models, the literature, and drug compounds. The Platform also provides a range of annotation information for targets, diseases, phenotypes, and drugs, and their most relevant relationships.

The Platform is an open access and open source tool. The code and data are freely available for academic and commercial use, with appropriate citation of the latest publication.

It can be accessed in a variety of ways:

• Through an intuitive web user interface, available at platform.opentargets.org (Figure 7)
• Through the new GraphQL API, which you can also explore using the the GraphQL playground’s inbuilt documentation
• Using the BigQuery instance, open-targets-prod
• Or using data downloads, available on the downloads page or through FTP

While the association scores are useful to rank targets and diseases, they should not be used as confidence scores for a particular association. For example, targets associated with under-studied diseases may have low association scores because little information is available, but they could still be interesting from a therapeutic standpoint. The Platform provides the original sources of information for each piece of evidence supporting an association, and these should always be carefully considered.

For more information and help:

• Complete Open Targets informatics tools: Quick tour
• Watch the recorded introductory webinar
• Visit the Open Targets Platform documentation
• Join the Open Targets Community for FAQs, user questions, and example code