The OMIM database provides expert-curated gene-trait links, bypassing the need to assign noncoding SNPs to genes, a major source of uncertainty for present GWAS methods. Better methods for linking GWAS SNPs to causal genes may improve performance, supported by the fact that we found strong and statistically significant positive associations between GWAS genetic evidence and drug success when considering only the highest confidence SNP-gene links, characterized as having a leading SNP with R2 ≥ 0.9 to a variant predicted to be highly or moderately deleterious. However, OMIM’s focus on Mendelian phenotypes also means genetic variants will be higher effect size than those for quantitative traits or conditions prominent in the GWAS Catalog, which is unlikely to be addressed by improved computational methods.
