Ratnam, JoselineZdrazil, BarbaraDigles, DanielaCuadrado Rodríguez, EmilianoNeefs, Jean-MarcTipney, HannahSiebes, RonaldWaagmeester, AndraBradley, GlynChau, Chau HanRichter, LarsBrea Floriani, José ManuelEvelo, Chris T.Jacoby, EdgarSenger, StefanLoza García, María IsabelEcker, Gerhard F.Chichester, Christine2025-12-192025-12-192014-12-18Ratnam J, Zdrazil B, Digles D, CuadradoRodriguez E, Neefs J-M, et al. (2014) The Application of the Open Pharmacological Concepts Triple Store (Open PHACTS) to Support Drug Discovery Research. PLoS ONE 9(12): e115460. doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0115460https://hdl.handle.net/10347/44625Integration of open access, curated, high-quality information from multiple disciplines in the Life and Biomedical Sciences provides a holistic understanding of the domain. Additionally, the effective linking of diverse data sources can unearth hidden relationships and guide potential research strategies. However, given the lack of consistency between descriptors and identifiers used in different resources and the absence of a simple mechanism to link them, gathering and combining relevant, comprehensive information from diverse databases remains a challenge. The Open Pharmacological Concepts Triple Store (Open PHACTS) is an Innovative Medicines Initiative project that uses semantic web technology approaches to enable scientists to easily access and process data from multiple sources to solve real-world drug discovery problems. The project draws together sources of publicly-available pharmacological, physicochemical and biomolecular data, represents it in a stable infrastructure and provides well-defined information exploration and retrieval methods. Here, we highlight the utility of this platform in conjunction with workflow tools to solve pharmacological research questions that require interoperability between target, compound, and pathway data. Use cases presented herein cover 1) the comprehensive identification of chemical matter for a dopamine receptor drug discovery program 2) the identification of compounds active against all targets in the Epidermal growth factor receptor (ErbB) signaling pathway that have a relevance to disease and 3) the evaluation of established targets in the Vitamin D metabolism pathway to aid novel Vitamin D analogue design. The example workflows presented illustrate how the Open PHACTS Discovery Platform can be used to exploit existing knowledge and generate new hypotheses in the process of drug discoveryeng2014 Ratnam et al. This is an openaccess article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution LicenseAttribution 4.0 Internationalhttp://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/Open Pharmacological Concepts Triple StoreOpen PHACTSInnovative Medicines Initiative projectWorld drug discovery problemsjournal article10.1371/journal.pone.01154601932-6203open access