Pharos is a web resource that originated from the NIH "Illuminating the Druggable Genome" (IDG) program to characterize the understudied regions of the druggable genome. These so-called “dark” regions are important because they have potential druggable opportunities toward a wide range of disease areas. While displaying data on well known targets is fairly simple, it is much more difficult to display data, or the lack thereof, on understudied targets. To better facilitate analysis and prioritization of understudied targets, we recently  introduced two new features within Pharos. First, Pharos utilizes an “illumination graph” to display the strengths and weakness of the knowledge landscape for a target. Using a standardized visualization, it is possible to show what areas of the target have the most potential for illumination, which can direct funding and research into those realms. Second, Pharos has the capability to generate topics of interest for users. Topics can range from disease types to protein classes, and are an aggregation of the data available on each group of targets, diseases and small molecules. There are several benefits from this grouping. Users are able to view a target as part of a larger subset, one that frequently includes dark targets. In this context, we are also able to highlight a target’s potential by combining the IDG target level and knowledge score. Using these criteria we are able to illuminate targets with the most and least knowledge available, as well as targets that have druggable potential, or an easily bridged knowledge gap. These features can be valuable resources in the quest to increase the amount of knowledge available about dark targets.

Leveling the playing field: Illuminating understudied targets with Pharos

2019 Spring National Meeting

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