- Course overview
- Search within this course
- What is Open Targets?
- Deep dive into common disease genetics data (GWAS and QTL studies)
- Getting data from the Open Targets Platform
- Other informatics tools
- Summary
- Your feedback
- Get help and support on Open Targets’ informatics tools
- References
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What is the Open Targets Platform?
Introduction
The Platform is Open Targets’ flagship informatics tool, available at platform.opentargets.org. In this short video, recorded on 23 April 2025, Helena Cornu introduces the Open Target Platform:
The Platform is a freely available, open-source web portal that assists drug discovery researchers in identifying and prioritising potential drug targets.
Using the Platform, you can:
- View a prioritised list of drug targets associated with a disease of interest, or a prioritised list of diseases associated with a target of interest, with a detailed breakdown of the evidence by datasource
- Examine the underlying evidence used to build and support target-disease associations, and easily find the source data
- Explore an assessment of target-specific properties of interest when evaluating the suitability of a target for a drug discovery programme. Target factors are scored using a traffic light system to provide users with an at-a-glance overview of target attributes
- Explore annotation data relevant to target discovery and therapeutic hypothesis building for targets, diseases, drugs, variants, and GWAS/mol QTL studies
- Dig in detailed information about disease-causing variants and their gene predictions based on our in-house Locus-to-Gene machine learning model (L2G)
The Platform data model
It integrates publicly available datasets from over 20 different data sources, and uses this evidence to build and score target-disease associations. The Platform also integrates relevant annotation information about targets, diseases/phenotypes, and drugs, as well as variants, genome-wide association studies (GWAS) and eQTL studies, and credible sets derived from our in-house analysis of these studies.
In this short video, recorded on 23 April 2025, Helena Cornu introduces the Open Target Platform’s data model:
The Platform is actively maintained, with four releases a year. Details of the latest release are available at https://platform-docs.opentargets.org/release-notes, and on the Open Targets blog (https://blog.opentargets.org/tag/release-notes/).