2018 AACR Drug Target Explorer

In the modern drug discovery process, high-throughput screens of drugs are a common and important step in the identification of novel treatments. Frequently, these screens are phenotypic; i.e. they test compounds with known or unknown mechanisms of action in a biological model and evaluate a phenotype. While these types of screens facilitate the identification of active molecules, they also present challenges, including:<br>(1) Identifying the mechanism(s) of action of a compound(2) literature frequently disagrees on drug targets(3) Identifying common targets within screen hits(4) Interpretation of polypharmacologic compounds(5) Identifying structurally/functionally related molecules <br>Multiple tools and databases exist that address these challenges. The majority of these tools allow users to explore drug-target relationships. However, none of the tools fulfill all of the criteria listed in Table 1 of the poster. To address this, we developed the Drug-Target Explorer. This tool enables the user to:<br><br>(1) look up targets for molecules,(2) explore networks of targets and drugs,(3) perform gene list enrichment of targets(4) compare query molecules to cancer screening datasets(5) discover bioactive molecules using a query target<br>We anticipate that the users will include biologists and chemists involved in drug discovery who are interested in performing hypothesis generation of human targets for novel molecules, identifying off-targets for bioactive small molecules of interest, and exploring of the polypharmacologic nature of small molecules.