May update: MSD joins Open Targets!

Welcome MSD! We were thrilled to announce this week that MSD has joined the Open Targets consortium.

Also in this edition: Open Targets Directors and members of the Scientific Leadership team published their perspective on Open Targets, we attended the Target to Patient conference, and we are recruiting Research Software Engineers for a new project in Generative AI.

Appreciating the May flowers,

Helena

MSD has joined the Open Targets consortium

This week, Open Targets announced MSD as the latest partner to join the collaboration.

“We are pleased to join the Open Targets consortium and believe this unique public-private model will allow us to leverage large-scale genomics data along with advances in AI and machine learning, so we can better understand the underlying drivers of disease and enable more efficient target discovery,” said Iya Khalil , Vice President and Head of Data, AI and genome sciences, MSD Research Laboratories. “We look forward to working closely with our partners at Open Targets.”

Welcome to the team!

Human Genetics and Genomics for Drug Target Identification and Prioritization: Open Targets’ Perspective

Our perspective on the use of human genetics and genomics for drug target identification and prioritisation was published in the Annual Review of Biomedical Data Science earlier this month.

It's a useful primer on Open Targets, in which we describe our approach using examples from our work of the past 10 years, and we lay out our framework for building therapeutic hypotheses (pictured above).

Reference.

McDonagh et al. Human Genetics and Genomics for Drug Target Identification and Prioritization: Open Targets’ Perspective (2024) Annual Review of Biomedical Data Science

We were at the Target to Patient conference on the Welcome Genome Campus this week! Executive Director David Hulcoop presented the Open Targets partnership, in the Approaches to Target Selection session chaired by Translational Informatics Director Ellen McDonagh.

Job board

Interested in joining Open Targets? We are currently recruiting:

• Senior Research Assistant – Experimental Oncology Technical Specialist (Maternity Cover) (2 May —TODAY) — This position offers an exciting opportunity to work on a project that comprises the largest, to date, dataset of dual CRISPR perturbations (65K pairs, 45 cell lines, 2 tissue types) and validate therapeutic hypotheses that exploit synthetic lethality in cancer. The Open Targets Validation Lab provide additional experimental evidence to support the relevance of targets of new therapeutic potential in disease biology.

• Research software Engineer - Large Language Model focus (20 May) — We are seeking a highly skilled and motivated Research Software Engineer with expertise in Python and Large Language Model (LLM) integration to join the AI knowledge management project for a period of 3 years. You will be a key player in designing and operating software that integrates cutting-edge knowledge graphs, LLMs and ML techniques into our biomedical data processing and drug discovery platforms.

• Research Software Engineer - Database and Knowledge Representation (20 May) —  As a Research Software Engineer you will be instrumental in extending our Open Targets Platform framework to include a modular knowledge graph platform. Your expertise will enhance the robustness and efficiency of our data processing and knowledge representation systems, contributing directly to our open science initiatives.

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 or emailing outreach@opentargets.org!

— Helena, Open Targets Communications Lead