Customer
This project stems from a strong request from leading pharmaceutical companies to enhance cancer drug discovery. They aim to leverage advanced genomic tools to accelerate the identification of promising drug targets and repurpose existing therapies for other cancers.
The Challenge
Drug discovery in oncology relies on identifying viable therapeutic targets, but current approaches often oversimplify the complexity of human diseases. The Open Targets Platform integrates diverse data types but lacks the rich, real-world cancer genomics data available in cBioPortal. Pharmaceutical companies require a solution that bridges this data gap, enabling better disease understanding, target discovery, and drug repurposing.
How We Solved It
The Hyve developed an innovative pipeline to integrate cBioPortal data as an extra association evidence into the Open Targets Platform:
Data Extraction: Retrieved genomic alteration frequencies from cBioPortal.
Data Transformation: Reformatted study-record-oriented datasets into gene-disease-oriented structures.
Identifier Mapping: Mapped cBioPortal identifiers (e.g., Oncotree codes) to Open Targets-compliant identifiers (e.g., EFO, ENSEMBL IDs).
This integration enriches Open Targets’ multi-omic framework with curated cancer genomic data, enabling researchers to explore target-disease associations with enhanced precision. For example, for round cell liposarcoma (MONDO_0020561), incorporating cBioPortal data elevated the target-disease association score for TERT (ENSG00000164362), highlighting it as a potential target for prominent pharmaceutical companies to exploit.
The Outcome
The integration significantly enhances Open Targets’ utility:
Improved Target Discovery: The enriched data helps identify new top targets, as evidenced by the discovery of TERT for round-cell liposarcoma.
Accelerated Drug Repurposing: Leveraging cBioPortal data facilitates the identification of drugs with potential for other indications, expediting preclinical and clinical trials.
Comprehensive Understanding: Researchers gain deeper insights into cancer types and genetic variants, leading to more informed therapeutic strategies.
This use case showcases how The Hyve's integration efforts address critical industry challenges, delivering tangible benefits to the oncology research community and driving innovation in drug development.
For more details, read the full article here: Bridging the Gap: Open Targets & cBioPortal Join Forces for Drug Discovery. Want to test this integration yourself? Head on over to our Open Targets Platform demo.
Closing Remarks
The integration of Open Targets and cBioPortal demonstrates how open-source tools can collaborate to advance research and streamline drug discovery processes.
If you’re interested in exploring the Open Targets Platform and potential customizations to suit your research needs, get in touch with us today. Let us help you harness the power of integrated data to accelerate your discoveries.