scholarly journals Pathway analysis of GWAS loci identifies novel drug targets and repurposing opportunities

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Deepali Jhamb ◽  
Michal Magid-Slav ◽  
Mark R. Hurle ◽  
Pankaj Agarwal

AbstractGenome-wide association studies (GWAS) have made considerable progress and there is emerging evidence that genetics-based targets can lead to 28% more launched drugs. However, translating the results of GWAS for drug discovery remains challenging. We analyzed 1,589 GWAS across 1,456 protein interaction pathways to translate these often, imprecise genetic loci into therapeutic hypotheses for 182 diseases. We validate these pathway-based genetic targets by testing if current drug targets are enriched in the pathway space of the same indication. Remarkably, 30% of diseases have significantly more targets in these pathways than expected by chance; the comparable number for GWAS alone (without using pathway analysis) is zero. Although pathway analysis is routine for GWAS, this study shows that the routine analysis can often enrich for drug targets, by performing a systematic global analysis to translate genetic findings into therapeutic hypotheses for new drug discovery and repositioning opportunities for current drugs.

2021 ◽  
Vol 41 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Kyuto Sonehara ◽  
Yukinori Okada

AbstractGenome-wide association studies have identified numerous disease-susceptibility genes. As knowledge of gene–disease associations accumulates, it is becoming increasingly important to translate this knowledge into clinical practice. This challenge involves finding effective drug targets and estimating their potential side effects, which often results in failure of promising clinical trials. Here, we review recent advances and future perspectives in genetics-led drug discovery, with a focus on drug repurposing, Mendelian randomization, and the use of multifaceted omics data.


Author(s):  
Max Lam ◽  
Chia-Yen Chen ◽  
Tian Ge ◽  
Yan Xia ◽  
David W. Hill ◽  
...  

AbstractBroad-based cognitive deficits are an enduring and disabling symptom for many patients with severe mental illness, and these impairments are inadequately addressed by current medications. While novel drug targets for schizophrenia and depression have emerged from recent large-scale genome-wide association studies (GWAS) of these psychiatric disorders, GWAS of general cognitive ability can suggest potential targets for nootropic drug repurposing. Here, we (1) meta-analyze results from two recent cognitive GWAS to further enhance power for locus discovery; (2) employ several complementary transcriptomic methods to identify genes in these loci that are credibly associated with cognition; and (3) further annotate the resulting genes using multiple chemoinformatic databases to identify “druggable” targets. Using our meta-analytic data set (N = 373,617), we identified 241 independent cognition-associated loci (29 novel), and 76 genes were identified by 2 or more methods of gene identification. Actin and chromatin binding gene sets were identified as novel pathways that could be targeted via drug repurposing. Leveraging our transcriptomic and chemoinformatic databases, we identified 16 putative genes targeted by existing drugs potentially available for cognitive repurposing.


2020 ◽  
Vol 36 (9) ◽  
pp. 2936-2937 ◽  
Author(s):  
Gareth Peat ◽  
William Jones ◽  
Michael Nuhn ◽  
José Carlos Marugán ◽  
William Newell ◽  
...  

Abstract Motivation Genome-wide association studies (GWAS) are a powerful method to detect even weak associations between variants and phenotypes; however, many of the identified associated variants are in non-coding regions, and presumably influence gene expression regulation. Identifying potential drug targets, i.e. causal protein-coding genes, therefore, requires crossing the genetics results with functional data. Results We present a novel data integration pipeline that analyses GWAS results in the light of experimental epigenetic and cis-regulatory datasets, such as ChIP-Seq, Promoter-Capture Hi-C or eQTL, and presents them in a single report, which can be used for inferring likely causal genes. This pipeline was then fed into an interactive data resource. Availability and implementation The analysis code is available at www.github.com/Ensembl/postgap and the interactive data browser at postgwas.opentargets.io.


2019 ◽  
Vol 24 (6) ◽  
pp. 1232-1236 ◽  
Author(s):  
Deepali Jhamb ◽  
Michal Magid-Slav ◽  
Mark R. Hurle ◽  
Pankaj Agarwal

2019 ◽  
Vol 84 (6) ◽  
pp. 240-255
Author(s):  
Lei Zhang ◽  
Charalampos Papachristou ◽  
Pankaj K. Choudhary ◽  
Swati Biswas

<b><i>Background:</i></b> Pathway analysis allows joint consideration of multiple SNPs belonging to multiple genes, which in turn belong to a biologically defined pathway. This type of analysis is usually more powerful than single-SNP analyses for detecting joint effects of variants in a pathway. <b><i>Methods:</i></b> We develop a Bayesian hierarchical model by fully modeling the 3-level hierarchy, namely, SNP-gene-pathway that is naturally inherent in the structure of the pathways, unlike the currently used ad hoc ways of combining such information. We model the effects at each level conditional on the effects of the levels preceding them within the generalized linear model framework. To deal with the high dimensionality, we regularize the regression coefficients through an appropriate choice of priors. The model is fit using a combination of iteratively weighted least squares and expectation-maximization algorithms to estimate the posterior modes and their standard errors. A normal approximation is used for inference. <b><i>Results:</i></b> We conduct simulations to study the proposed method and find that our method has higher power than some standard approaches in several settings for identifying pathways with multiple modest-sized variants. We illustrate the method by analyzing data from two genome-wide association studies on breast and renal cancers. <b><i>Conclusion:</i></b> Our method can be helpful in detecting pathway association.


Biomedicines ◽  
2016 ◽  
Vol 4 (4) ◽  
pp. 27 ◽  
Author(s):  
Suhas Vasaikar ◽  
Pooja Bhatia ◽  
Partap Bhatia ◽  
Koon Chu Yaiw

2018 ◽  
Vol 21 (2) ◽  
pp. 84-88 ◽  
Author(s):  
W. David Hill

Intelligence and educational attainment are strongly genetically correlated. This relationship can be exploited by Multi-Trait Analysis of GWAS (MTAG) to add power to Genome-wide Association Studies (GWAS) of intelligence. MTAG allows the user to meta-analyze GWASs of different phenotypes, based on their genetic correlations, to identify association's specific to the trait of choice. An MTAG analysis using GWAS data sets on intelligence and education was conducted by Lam et al. (2017). Lam et al. (2017) reported 70 loci that they described as ‘trait specific’ to intelligence. This article examines whether the analysis conducted by Lam et al. (2017) has resulted in genetic information about a phenotype that is more similar to education than intelligence.


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