Abstract

Abstract: The selection of a drug target is the first step of a process that consumes huge quantities of time and money in both academia and the biotech and pharma industries, but truly objective data driven approaches to this problem are still in their infancy. In this seminar I will review the approaches we take in GSK to identify and validate drug targets through integrative analysis of large scale ‘omic and epidemiological data. Our approach is rooted in the causal inferences made possible by advances in human genetics, including GWAS and Mendelian Randomisation, but also includes epigenetics, transcriptomics and network biology. I will finish by describing the Open Targets collaboration between GSK , Biogen, the Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute and the European Bioinformatics Institute. Open Target’s mission is to both generate and integrate genome-scale data in support of target identification and validation and is committed to openly sharing data with the scientific community through publications, internationally recognised databases and the Open Targets Platform.