Guide to IMMUNOPHARMACOLOGY – beta release v1.0, May 2017

We are pleased to announce the first, public, beta-release of the Guide to IMMUNOPHARMACOLOGY (GtoImmuPdb). The GtoImmuPdb is a Wellcome Trust-funded extension to the existing Guide to PHARMACOLOGY (GtoPdb) and the beta-release (v1.0) marks an important milestone in its production and development. GtoImmuPdb aims to provide improved data exchange between immunology and pharmacology expert communities, so to better support research and development of drugs targeted at modulating immune, inflammatory or infectious components of disease. The underlying GtoPdb schema has been extended to incorporate new immune system specific data types (such as processes, cell types and disease) and the GtoPdb website has been developed to surface this new data and incorporate it into the existing search and browse mechanisms. A new Guide to IMMUNOPHARMACOLOGY portal (Figure 1)(www.guidetoimmunopharmacology.org) has been developed, which serves as a unique immunological access-point to the Guide to PHARMACOLOGY.

The GtoImmuPdb enriches the existing GtoPdb by flagging targets and ligands of immunological relevance and linking these targets to immunological process, cell types and relevant diseases. In terms of processes and cell types, GtoImmuPdb has developed top-level categories (Figure 2), that aim to be meaningful and intuitive to immunologists, against which targets and ligands in the database can be annotated. These categories are underpinned by the use of both the Gene Ontology and the Cell Ontology. Using recognised ontologies provides a controlled vocabulary for higher resolution annotation (Figure 3). It also facilitates interoperability between new data types in GtoImmuPdb and external resources that also use these ontologies.

Data linking targets and ligands to disease is also incorporated into GtoImmuPdb, with the curation of disease associations using resources such as OrphaNet, Disease Ontology and OMIM (Figure 4).

As well as the development of the GtoImmuPdb Portal, the web-interface has been further developed with immunological data and users in mind. It has been designed to provide a unique ‘GtoImmuPdb view’ of the data, highlighting content of immunological relevance and prioritising immunological data in search results and display. It includes features that highlight targets, target families and ligands of immunological relevance (Figure 5); toggle buttons to enable the GtoImmuPdb view to be switched on and off (Figure 6); and new pages and sections to display immunological data (Figure 7).

Development of the beta-release is ongoing with regular updates planned over the next few months as the quantity of data captured increases and improvements in the site layout and function are made. One of our priorities over the next 6 months is to undertake rigorous site testing with interested user groups to capture more insight and feedback. We welcome those interested and potential future users to get in touch with us.

This project is supported by a 3-year grant awarded to Professor Jamie Davies at the University of Edinburgh by the Wellcome Trust (WT).