Drug Target Commons: A Community Effort to Build a Consensus Knowledge Base for Drug-Target Interactions

Knowledge of the full target space of bioactive substances, approved and investigational drugs as well as chemical probes, provides important insights into therapeutic potential and possible adverse effects. The existing compound-target bioactivity data resources are often incomparable due to non-standardized and heterogeneous assay types and variability in endpoint measurements. To extract higher value from the existing and future compound target-profiling data, we implemented an open-data web platform, named Drug Target Commons (DTC), which features tools for crowd-sourced compound-target bioactivity data annotation, standardization, curation, and intra-resource integration. We demonstrate the unique value of DTC with several examples related to both drug discovery and drug repurposing applications and invite researchers to join this community effort to increase the reuse and extension of compound bioactivity data. Tang et al. launches a novel crowd-sourcing effort to standardize the collection, management, curation, and annotation of the notoriously heterogeneous compound-target bioactivity measurements. The web-based community platform aims to provide the most comprehensive, reproducible, and sustainable bioactivity knowledge base for the end users.