Caution when using network partners for target identification in drug discovery

Identifying novel, high-yield drug targets is challenging and often results in a high failure rate. However, recent data indicates that leveraging human genetic evidence to identify and validate these targets significantly increases the likelihood of success in drug development. Two recent papers from Open Targets claimed that around half of FDA-approved drugs had targets with direct human genetic evidence. By expanding target identification to include protein network partners—molecules in physical contact—the proportion of drug targets with genetic evidence support increased to two-thirds. However, the efficacy of using these network partners for target identification was not formally tested. To address this, we tested the approach on a list of robust positive control genes. We used the IntAct database to find molecular interacting proteins of genes identified by exome-wide association studies (ExWAS) and genome-wide association studies (GWAS) combined with a locus-to-gene mapping algorithm called the Effector Index (Ei). We assessed how accurately including interacting genes with the ExWAS and Effector Index selected genes identified positive controls, focusing on precision, sensitivity, and specificity. Our results indicated that although molecular interactions led to higher sensitivity in identifying positive control genes, their practical application is limited by low precision. Hence, expanding genetically identified targets to include network partners did not increase the chance of identifying drug targets, suggesting that such results should be interpreted with caution.