Pharmaceutical companies are investing in the creation and analysis of genomics data in the hope of improving target selection and decreasing failures due to lack of efficacy [22] or adverse effects [23]. Previous work by Nelson et al. 2015 [3] supported this investment, showing gene target-indication pairs with genetic evidence are approximately twice as likely to progress from Phase I to approval. This quantitative estimate is the product of many decisions, for example how to identify similar traits in genomics and pipeline databases, that, although reasonable, could have been made differently. Additionally, the results were based on a large historical set of approved drugs and might not hold for present-day target selection. This motivated us to replicate the analysis using 5 years of data that has accumulated since their data freeze in 2013.
