<div>In the modern drug discovery process, high-throughput screens of drugs are a common and important step in the identification of novel treatments. Frequently, these screens are phenotypic; i.e. they test compounds with known or unknown mechanisms of action in a biological model and evaluate a phenotype. While these types of screens facilitate the identification of active molecules, they also present challenges, including:</div><div><br></div><div>(1) Identifying the mechanism(s) of action of a compound</div><div>(2) literature frequently disagrees on drug targets</div><div>(3) Identifying common targets within screen hits</div><div>(4) Interpretation of polypharmacologic compounds</div><div>(5) Identifying structurally/functionally related molecules </div><div><br></div><div>Multiple tools and databases exist that address these challenges. The majority of these tools allow users to explore drug-target relationships. However, none of the tools fulfill all of the criteria listed in Table 1 of the poster. To address this, we developed the Drug-Target Explorer. This tool enables the user to:</div><div><br></div><div><br></div><div>(1) look up targets for molecules,</div><div>(2) explore networks of targets and drugs,</div><div>(3) perform gene list enrichment of targets</div><div>(4) compare query molecules to cancer screening datasets</div><div>(5) discover bioactive molecules using a query target</div><div><br></div><div>We anticipate that the users will include biologists and chemists involved in drug discovery who are interested in performing hypothesis generation of human targets for novel molecules, identifying off-targets for bioactive small molecules of interest, and exploring of the polypharmacologic nature of small molecules.</div
