Users can explore therapeutic hypotheses within the Platform, ensuring that targets have supportive evidence for efficacy and safety prior to transition to the next stages of drug development. These preclinical target assessments are important as they can increase the chance of drug approval for specific indications. For example, drugs that have targets with underlying evidence for a genetic association with the relevant disease are twice as likely to succeed in clinical trials and be approved (5,6). To this end, a major new feature in the Platform is the incorporation of evidence from the Open Targets Genetics Portal (https://genetics.opentargets.org/), which integrates publicly available human genome-wide association (GWAS) data with functional genomics to associate disease loci with target genes (7). The evidence from the genetics portal is integrated into our scoring system and informs target prioritisation for a given disease. With regard to safety, a key addition we provide is the evaluation of significant post-marketing adverse drug reactions from the FDA Adverse Event Reporting System (FAERS) for approved drugs, as well as curated safety information, to help inform the potential impact of modulating a given target.
