By expanding the Open Targets Platform to new entities such as drugs, we hope to enhance the ability for our data model to capture information in order to better answer real world questions. This has allowed us to incorporate important drug and compound information such as mode of action, approved and experimental indications, small molecule representations as well as analysis of post-marketing ADRs. Enhanced target information includes chemical probe and target enabling packages information. Adoption of EFO version 3 has been pivotal in expanding the number of target–disease associations within the Platform. The expanded ontology allows new direct target–disease associations to be incorporated from the data sources, as well as ‘indirect’ associations where evidence is applied throughout the ontological structure of disease classification. As an example, this can be useful to users interested in targets that have been associated with a broad therapeutic area, or conversely a very specific disease. It also allows the collation of evidence for a target for a given therapeutic area, when the evidence annotations may be sparse for individual diseases that fall under this.
