The identification of novel druggable targets for developing safe and effective medicines is a key priority for the pharmaceutical industry. However, drug development is inefficient, with over 90% of the drugs that enter clinical trials failing, often at late stages, with the primary reason being an inability to demonstrate efficacy (1). These failures inflict major resource and time losses where it is estimated that the total R&D cost per new drug is over $2.5 billion (2). They also largely reflect our poor understanding of disease biology and hence it is critical to incorporate new evidence in drug development decisions that could help impact drug success. Drugs with targets that have underlying genetic evidence for disease association have been shown to be twice as likely to succeed in clinical development (3,4). Therefore, systematic evaluation of genetic associations for a particular disease or trait can aid discovery of suitable targets (genes) for drug development. There is now a large and ever-growing number of human genome-wide association studies (GWAS) and population biobank studies generating evidence for the role of genetic variants in common or complex disease phenotypes.
