August update: Why clinical trials stop, new team members, gatherings of minds

If Open Targets were an Olympic sport, what would it be? Please send us your thoughts on this — Comms Points will be awarded for puns.

Non-sporting-event-related things on our mind in July: we published our analysis of clinical trial stop reasons, we welcomed two new data team members, and we met with teams from Alzheimer’s Research UK and Genes & Health, in addition to our usual activities.

Back to cheering on sports I know nothing about,

Helena

Why clinical trials stop: the role of genetics

Published this week in Nature Genetics, a team at Open Targets and the European Bioinformatics Institute | EMBL-EBI trained a?machine learning classifier to analyse the free-text reasons explaining why 28,842 clinical trials stopped.

By evaluating the genetic evidence underpinning the target-disease relationships in these trials, the study shows that clinical trials that stopped for negative reasons (e.g. safety or efficacy concerns) were less supported by genetic evidence.

“(…) genetic support is clearly both predictive of clinical trial progression and protective of early trial stoppage,” said David Ochoa , Open Targets Platform Coordinator.

“This is strong support for Open Targets’ founding aim to use the information generated by genetic sequencing and genomics studies to systematically improve the selection of targets for drug development.”

You can also read Emily King 's News and Views article?on the work.

Olesya Razuvayevskaya et al. Genetic factors associated with reasons for clinical trial stoppage. Nat Genet (2024). DOI: 10.1038/s41588-024-01854-z

Welcome Tobi and Vivien!

Vivien Ho is a bioinformatician in the data team, actively developing our pipelines to analyse, interpret and integrate our growing experimental research data with public domain data.

Tobi Alegbe joins the team as a Single Cell Data Scientist, working to expand our informatics platforms through the integration of single cell omics data.

Open Targets welcomed two sets of visitors to Campus this month.

Our team met with the?Alzheimer’s Reseach Drug Discovery Institutes at Oxford, Cambridge, and UCL?(left) to discuss the bioinformatics challenges and opportunities for enhancing our identification and prioritisation of targets in the context of neurodegeneration.

David van Heel?(right) presented at the most recent lab meeting. David is Chief Investigator and Joint Lead of Genes & Health, a large-scale, long-term community-based health research study of British-Bangladeshi and Pakistani-origin volunteers, ethnicities which are mostly missing from many clinical trials and cohorts.

Thank you for voting in last month’s poll on the top question we should address from single-cell data. Across our social media polls, the top answer was Function in disease.

From our Product Manager Annalisa Buniello, PhD : "Thank you all for contributing to our scientific roadmaps!"

“Given the interest in single-cell datasets that can shed some light on cell type function in disease, these will be a priority for analysis and integration into the Open Targets informatics ecosystem. Our initial focus will be on IBD, lung cancer, and neurodegenerative diseases. Exciting science ahead: watch this space!"

Interested in joining Open Targets?

We’re not currently recruiting, but keep an eye on our jobs page for all our opportunities.

I’d love to know what you think of this newsletter — let me know by commenting here or emailing [email protected]!

— Helena, Open Targets Communications Lead