Open Targets

Director Open Targets

Ian Dunham

Director Open Targets

dunham [at] ebi.ac.uk

ORCID: 0000-0003-2525-5598

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Ian Dunham is Director of Open Targets, an innovative public-private partnership to improve identification and prioritisation of drug targets. Open Targets conducts research programmes in bioinformatics and experimental genomics and genetics to integrate data that will improve drug target choice.

As part of the partnership, Ian's group have developed the Open Targets Platform and the Open Targets Genetics Portal to provide public access to integrated information around the likely efficacy of a drug target. These resources interact with a number of other groups within EMBL-EBI including the SPOT team for ontologies, GWAS Catalog, ChEMBL, European Variation Archive (EVA), UniProt, EuropePMC and Expression Atlas.

Ian's earlier research interests include experimental and computational approaches to genome-wide mapping of regulatory elements and chromatin state in the human genome as part of the NHGRI ENCODE project, as well as understanding the influence of variation on regulatory elements in human and other organisms, including leading the Ensembl Regulation team.

He was previously a Senior Group Leader at the Wellcome Sanger Institute from 1993, focusing first on genome sequencing including the first human chromosome sequence in 1999, and subsequently on developing functional maps of the human genome. This included gene structure maps, variation maps, and the first chromosome-wide linkage disequilibrium map. He also holds an Associate Faculty postion at the Wellcome Sanger Institute.