Web platform to help drug discovery efforts

The Centre for Therapeutic Target Validation (CTTV) has launched the Target Validation Platform — a web-based platform that helps life science researchers identify therapeutic targets for new and repurposed medicines. By drawing on public data resources, the platform enables researchers to access thousands of target profiles summarising the evidence for the involvement of a specific gene product with a disease.

Establishing the validity of an association between a disease and biological target for a drug can be challenging and expensive. To address this issue, the CTTV — a collaboration between GSK, the Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute and the European Bioinformatics Institute — created the Target Validation Platform as part of its commitment to share its data openly to benefit the broader scientific community.

“We have learned so much about the links between genes, tissue function and disease, and we need solid partnerships like the CTTV to make sure that knowledge makes it to the people who make medicines,” said CCTV Director Jeff Barrett. “The Target Validation Platform is all about enabling communities to work together, making the hand-off from basic research to drug discovery smoother.”

“Our ability to identify and validate effective targets can mean the difference between developing a new medicine successfully or wasting valuable time and resources pursuing dead ends,” added Lon Cardon, senior vice president of GSK R&D.

The platform provides a single, robust infrastructure that integrates high-level information from key sources of evidence covering common and rare disease genetics, somatic mutations in cancer, tissue and cellular expression patterns, information mined from published scientific literature, approved drugs, reaction pathways and animal models. According to CTTV Scientific Director Ian Dunham, the service provides evidence for “over 21,800 targets, with more than 8800 structured disease and clinical phenotype terms — but we expect those numbers to grow substantially as we integrate CTTV experimental project data”.

Co-designed with biologists, it is easy to search the platform by target, disease or therapeutic area. Dunham noted, “We worked very closely with biologists working in different environments to make sure the platform would be both useful and intuitive.”

The director of the Sanger Institute, Professor Sir Mike Stratton, concluded, “The CTTV enables researchers in academia to work with industry, bringing the research bases together in a precompetitive environment to deliver insight into the genomics underlying disease. The databases and analytical methods developed will increase our knowledge of the biological targets of diseases to help advance treatments.”

The platform can be accessed at www.targetvalidation.org.