Evaluating potential drug targets through human loss-of-function genetic variation
By E. Minikel, Konrad J. Karczewski, H. Martin, Beryl B. Cummings, N. Whiffin, Daniel Rhodes, Jessica Alföldi, R. Trembath, D. Heel, Mark J. Daly and 2 more. 2019
22 citations recorded by the source corpus.
Naturally occurring human genetic variants predicted to cause loss of function of protein-coding genes provide an in vivo model of human gene inactivation that complements cell and model organism knockout studies. Here we investigate the application of human loss-of-function variants to assess genes as candidate drug targets, with three key findings. First, even essential genes, where loss-of-function variants are not tolerated, can be highly successful as targets of inhibitory drugs. Second, in most genes, loss-of-function variants are sufficiently rare that genotype-based ascertainment of homozygous or compound heterozygous “knockout” humans will await sample sizes ~1,000 times those available at present. Third, automated variant annotation and filtering are powerful, but manual curation remains critical for removing artifacts and making biological inferences, and is a prerequisite for recall-by-genotype efforts. Our results provide a roadmap for human “knockout” studies and should guide interpretation of loss-of-function variants in drug development.
Subfields: Genetics, Molecular Biology
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In Genetics
- Anne H. O'Donnell-Luria
- Konrad J. Karczewski
- Jessica Alföldi
- Beryl B. Cummings
- J. Kosmicki
- Matthew Solomonson
In Molecular Biology
Citations in the corpus
- Transcript expression-aware annotation improves rare variant discovery and interpretation (2019, background): “This metric has already proven useful in variant curation for drug target identification ( 32 ) and for filtering variants for identification of human knockouts( 1 ).”