BDI Seminar - Will big data deliver new drug targets?

Abstract

An ever-increasing volume and complexity of data is now available within the life sciences, much of it potentially relevant to drug discovery. Methods to integrate, analyse and visualise such data are key to making effective decisions in the discovery and development of new medicines. The European Bioinformatics Institute, based on the Wellcome Genome Campus in Hinxton, develops and delivers many of these data resources and tools to the scientific community, freely available and without restriction on use. In this talk, we will describe some of the data resources and workflows that can be used to answer practical questions in drug discovery, with a particular focus on target selection. The Open Targets (OT) collaboration is an important project in this context; the OT informatics platform integrates data relevant to targets and diseases from multiple resources and provides an easy-to-use interface to help users explore and process the data. Complementing the target-disease evidence relationships within  OT is a target tractability platform, which  helps users assess the "do-ability' of a target, for both small molecule and antibody modalities. We will also describe our work to explore the composition of the human microbiome, and its potential role in health and disease.  As the number and size of the datasets from the human gut microbiome have increased, a more elaborate picture is beginning to form about the complexity of the microbiota. The relevance of these new discoveries, the current limitations and the potential for novel drug discovery will be outlined.