I have a question about how to properly use and interpret the OAS score.
Specifically, I would like to know whether the OAS calculated for a target-disease association (for example, ACHE - acetylcholinesterase and Alzheimer’s disease, with an OAS of 0.62) can be compared to the OAS of another target-disease pair (such as EGFR - epidermal growth factor receptor and lung adenocarcinoma, with an OAS of 0.81).
Can the OAS be considered a quantitative measure that allows for comparisons across different target-disease pairs? For instance, can I conclude that the association of EGFR with lung adenocarcinoma is stronger than the association of ACHE with Alzheimer’s disease based on these values?
Or is it more appropriate to use the OAS as a quantitative value only within a specific context (e.g, between all the diseases associated with a specific target) ? For example, I could say that ACHE is more strongly associated with Alzheimer’s (OAS = 0.62) than with COVID-19 (OAS = 0.4)?
This is indeed a recurrent question. You can find an explanation in the documentation
There are a few important considerations regarding association scores. As described above, association scores are a heuristic based on the availability of data. While scores are useful to rank lists of targets or diseases, they should not be interpreted as a confidence score for the target-disease association.
For example, under-studied diseases are unlikely to produce high-scoring targets due to the lack of available evidence. In such diseases, a relatively low-scoring target might still be the top-ranked target and potentially a very interesting lead from a therapeutic standpoint.
Similarly, not all associations with available target-disease evidence should be considered legitimate target-disease associations. Some of our data sources rely on predictions to assess the relationship between a target and a disease. Thus, they should be considered with caution and always take their relative support into consideration.
Even though I’m quite confident about the answer, I still have another question: Is the OAS for target-disease associations normalized within a specific target (meaning that it takes into account the OAS of that target’s associations with other diseases), or is it calculated independently for each target-disease association?
