Connecting genetics and gene expression data for target prioritisation and drug repositioning

Developing new drugs continues to be a highly inefficient and costly business. By repurposing an existing compound for a different indication, drug repositioning offers an attractive alternative to traditional drug discovery. Most of these approaches work by matching transcriptional disease signatures to anti-correlated gene expression profiles of drug perturbations. Genome-wide association studies (GWASs) are of great interest to researchers in the pharmaceutical industry because drug programmes with supporting genetic evidence are more likely to successfully progress through the drug discovery pipeline.