The drug discovery and development process is costly and ineffective; it is predicted that around 90% of drugs entering phase 1 clinical trials will not reach approval, and overall costs for each approved compound come to around $1.4 billion (1,2). In addition, patients treated with approved drugs may experience a lack of therapeutic response or adverse drug reactions, and many diseases still remain untreatable. The aim of the Open Targets consortium, which brings together research institutes, academic and industry partners in a pre-competitive collaboration, is to address the fundamental issue of drug attrition due to a lack of efficacy or safety, and support the identification of novel targets for disease treatment. The Open Targets Platform (https://www.targetvalidation.org/) provides an open source, publicly available knowledgebase and tools that enable evidence-based systematic prioritisation of targets for disease treatment (3,4). Our informatics pipeline addresses the challenges of ingesting different datasets and formats, handles large amounts of data, and standardises the data to integrate it together into one platform.
