Hi everyone,
I have a data curation question. Regarding the Open Targets platform data downloads (Open Targets Platform) for Drug - Indications, how are drug combinations treated? Is each drug in a combination connected to the relevant indication? Are only single drugs included? Is there a uniform treatment across diseases or are there different rules for e.g. cancer or depending on the primary organ affected?
Many thanks,
Sanjay
Hi @sanjayb100 and welcome to our Community!
The uniform treatment is that we handle drug combinations on a per active substance basis. This means that drug/indication pairs from drug combinations are “exploded”, meaning that we connect each drug to the relevant indication individually.
A typical example of medicines with multiple drugs can be antimicrobials, where you have one single medicine combining multiple antibiotics to reach a synergistic effect; or cancer therapies which involve combining drugs independently to build a therapy. In both cases we will connect each drug to its indication separately.
The only place where you’ll find information on drug combinations is in our Pharmacogenetics data. This is to capture cases where variation in a gene affects the response to a combination of drugs, like lumacaftor/ivacaftor, both indicated for cystic fibrosis.
Let me know if you have more questions!
Irene
Thanks Irene, very useful!