Causal biology in the age of big data

Expectations are rising for researchers to show newly proposed drug targets have a causal role in driving or preventing disease. Companies mining human data to uncover novel target biology are all drawing on multiple lines of evidence, but they differ in where they start and what they emphasize — decisions that dictate their data needs and a host of other practical considerations.

The mandate to provide proof of causal human biology for novel targets, which was the subject of BioCentury’s 32nd annual Back to School edition in September, has emerged from the growing availability of human -omics data and increasingly sophisticated tools for measurement and analysis. ...