🧬 Open Targets Platform Scraper

🚀 Export drug, target, and disease intelligence in seconds. Pull 63,000+ targets, 20,000+ diseases, and 14,000+ drugs from the Open Targets Platform with evidence scores, tractability, mechanisms of action, and clinical phase. No registration, no manual extraction.

🕒 Last updated: 2026-05-20 · 📊 18 fields per record · 🧬 63k+ targets · 🦠 20k+ diseases · 💊 14k+ drugs

The Open Targets Platform Scraper exports drug discovery intelligence from the Open Targets Platform and returns up to 18 fields per record, including identifiers, synonyms, descriptions, tractability assessments, target-disease associations, mechanisms of action, and clinical-trial indications. The underlying dataset is the reference open knowledge graph for therapeutic target identification, jointly built by EMBL-EBI, GSK, Sanofi, Bristol Myers Squibb, and other contributors.

Coverage spans 63,000+ targets (Ensembl IDs), 20,000+ diseases (EFO/MONDO), and 14,000+ drugs (ChEMBL) with association scoring, druggability tiers, ubiquitination signals, pathway memberships, and disease-trait phenotype maps.

🎯 Target Audience	💡 Primary Use Cases
Pharma R&D teams, bioinformatics groups, biotech analysts, academic researchers, drug-repurposing startups, clinical-trial intelligence	Target prioritization, disease-target evidence reports, drug-repurposing scans, tractability snapshots, mechanism-of-action lookups, indication exploration

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📋 What the Open Targets Platform Scraper does

Three entity-specific workflows in a single run:

• 🧬 Targets. Pull gene-level records with approved symbol, biotype, synonyms, protein IDs, tractability across small-molecule / antibody / PROTAC / oligo modalities, pathway memberships, and the top associated diseases with evidence scores.
• 🦠 Diseases. Pull EFO/MONDO records with descriptions, synonyms, therapeutic areas, cross-references, ancestors/descendants, and the top associated targets.
• 💊 Drugs. Pull ChEMBL drug records with type, maximum clinical phase, approval status, withdrawals, trade names, mechanisms of action, and indication lists.

Each record includes a direct link back to the entity's page on platform.opentargets.org for spot-checking.

💡 Why it matters: drug discovery teams spend significant time stitching together target-disease evidence from disparate genetic, expression, and clinical sources. Open Targets is the canonical pre-stitched graph. This Actor flattens the relevant subset into a CSV/JSON snapshot you can drop into a notebook, dashboard, or LLM workflow.

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🎬 Full Demo

🚧 Coming soon: a 3-minute walkthrough showing how to go from sign-up to a downloaded dataset.

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⚙️ Input

Input	Type	Default	Behavior
maxItems	integer	10	Records to return. Free plan caps at 10, paid plan at 1,000,000.
entityType	string	"target"	One of target, disease, or drug.
searchQuery	string	""	Free-text search. Examples: BRAF, melanoma, pembrolizumab.
targetIds	string[]	[]	Ensembl gene IDs (used when entityType is target).
diseaseIds	string[]	[]	EFO or MONDO IDs (used when entityType is disease).
drugIds	string[]	[]	ChEMBL IDs (used when entityType is drug).

Example: top 25 search hits for "BRAF" as targets.

{
    "maxItems": 25,
    "entityType": "target",
    "searchQuery": "BRAF"
}

Example: enrich a list of known drugs.

{
    "maxItems": 5,
    "entityType": "drug",
    "drugIds": ["CHEMBL1201585", "CHEMBL1201218", "CHEMBL2108524"]
}

⚠️ Good to Know: when a list of IDs is provided, the scraper skips the search step and pulls those entities directly. When the list is empty, the search query is used. Both modes coexist so you can build a targeted ID-batch run or an exploratory search run from the same input form.

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📊 Output

Each record contains up to 18 fields depending on entity type. Download the dataset as CSV, Excel, JSON, or XML.

🧾 Schema (target)

Field	Type	Example
🧬 entityType	string	"target"
🆔 id	string	"ENSG00000157764"
🔤 approvedSymbol	string	"BRAF"
📛 approvedName	string	"B-Raf proto-oncogene, serine/threonine kinase"
🧪 biotype	string	"protein_coding"
📜 description	string | null	Protein function summary
🔁 synonyms	string[] | null	Symbol synonyms
🧫 proteinIds	object[] | null	UniProt and Ensembl protein IDs
🔗 crossReferences	object[] | null	DB x-refs
🎯 tractability	object[] | null	Modality x druggability matrix
📍 subcellularLocations	object[] | null	Cell compartment evidence
🛣️ pathways	object[] | null	Reactome pathway memberships
🧬 geneticConstraint	object[] | null	gnomAD constraint scores
🧪 targetClass	object[] | null	ChEMBL target-class taxonomy
🦠 associatedDiseases	object | null	Top disease evidence rows with scores
🔗 sourceUrl	string	Platform page
🕒 scrapedAt	ISO 8601	Collection timestamp

📦 Sample records

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✨ Why choose this Actor

	Capability
🧬	Full biomedical graph. 63k+ targets, 20k+ diseases, 14k+ drugs in a single Actor with consistent fields.
🎯	Multi-modality tractability. Small molecule, antibody, PROTAC, oligonucleotide, and other modality classes per target.
📊	Association scores. Top-N disease-target evidence with scores baked into the disease and target records.
💊	Clinical-phase data. Drug records include maximum clinical phase, approval status, withdrawal flags, and indications.
⚡	Fast. 25 entities in under 30 seconds, hundreds in a few minutes.
🔁	Always fresh. Every run pulls the latest Open Targets release through the official graph.
🚫	No authentication. Open scientific data. No login or token required.

📊 Open Targets is the consensus reference graph for target identification, used by major pharma R&D teams worldwide.

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📈 How it compares to alternatives

Approach	Cost	Coverage	Refresh	Filters	Setup
⭐ Open Targets Platform Scraper (this Actor)	$5 free credit, then pay-per-use	63k targets · 20k diseases · 14k drugs	Live per run	search, ID list, entity type	⚡ 2 min
Manual portal navigation	Free	Per-entity	Manual	None	🐢 Tedious
Direct custom queries	Engineering time	Full	Live	Custom	🛠️ Days
Commercial biomedical databases	$$$$/year	Variable	Variable	Many	⏳ Long contract

Pick this Actor when you want a clean, filtered slice of Open Targets without writing custom queries, handling pagination, or maintaining schema knowledge.

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🚀 How to use

1. 📝 Sign up. Create a free account with $5 credit (takes 2 minutes).
2. 🌐 Open the Actor. Go to the Open Targets Platform Scraper page on the Apify Store.
3. 🎯 Set input. Pick an entity type, then either supply a list of IDs or a free-text search.
4. 🚀 Run it. Click Start and let the Actor collect your data.
5. 📥 Download. Grab your results in the Dataset tab as CSV, Excel, JSON, or XML.

⏱️ Total time from signup to downloaded dataset: 3-5 minutes. No coding required.

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💼 Business use cases

💊 Pharma R&D and target ID Score and prioritize target candidates by association evidence Build a tractability matrix across SM, antibody, PROTAC modalities Compare disease overlap across a panel of candidates Power weekly target-deck refreshes for portfolio reviews	🧪 Drug repurposing Enumerate indications and trial phases per drug Find shared mechanisms across approved drugs Map drugs to alternate diseases through target overlap Seed retrospective evidence packages for repositioning
📊 Biotech analysts and BD Pull due-diligence snapshots on acquisition targets' assets Generate target/disease landscape reports for clients Track competitive drug pipelines by indication Build investor decks with sourced evidence scores	🧬 Academic bioinformatics Reproducible target/disease enrichment analyses Course datasets for translational informatics modules Hypothesis-generation scans across published evidence Curated cohorts for bench-side validation studies

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🔌 Automating Open Targets Platform Scraper

Control the scraper programmatically for scheduled runs and pipeline integrations:

• 🟢 Node.js. Install the apify-client NPM package.
• 🐍 Python. Use the apify-client PyPI package.
• 📚 See the Apify documentation for full details.

The Apify Schedules feature lets you trigger this Actor on any cron interval. Monthly refreshes keep downstream analytics aligned with new Open Targets releases.

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🌟 Beyond business use cases

Data like this powers more than commercial workflows. The same structured records support research, education, civic projects, and personal initiatives.

🎓 Research and academia Translational informatics coursework with reproducible pulls Systematic reviews of target-disease evidence Reproducible dataset snapshots for cited bioinformatics papers Open-data exercises around drug discovery and rare diseases	🎨 Personal and creative Bioscience side projects and visualizations Personal target-disease atlas dashboards Educational explainers and biotech newsletters Hobbyist exploration of human genetics and disease
🤝 Non-profit and civic Rare-disease patient organizations cataloging therapies Open-science publishing with cited evidence rows Drug-access transparency around indications and approvals Hackathons for disease research and biotech tooling	🧪 Experimentation Train biomedical NER and entity linking models Prompt engineering for LLM-driven literature triage Agent pipelines that look up tractability and pipelines Validate retrieval-augmented biomedical search

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🤖 Ask an AI assistant about this scraper

Open a ready-to-send prompt about this ParseForge actor in the AI of your choice:

• 💬 ChatGPT
• 🧠 Claude
• 🔍 Perplexity
• 🅒 Copilot

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❓ Frequently Asked Questions

🧩 How does it work?

Pick an entity type and either drop in a list of identifiers or run a free-text search. The Actor queries the Open Targets graph and returns one structured record per entity, including association rows and tractability matrices.

📏 How accurate is the data?

The records mirror the latest Open Targets release. Evidence scores and clinical phases are computed by the Open Targets pipeline from curated sources (ChEMBL, OpenFDA, ClinVar, Reactome, and many more). For clinical decisions, validate against primary sources.

🔁 How often is the dataset refreshed?

Open Targets ships full data releases on a regular cadence. Every run of this Actor pulls live from the graph, so your dataset reflects the latest published release at run time.

🧬 Which identifier systems are supported?

Ensembl gene IDs for targets, EFO and MONDO for diseases, and ChEMBL for drugs. Cross-references in the output map to UniProt, dbSNP, RefSeq, DrugBank, and other systems.

⏰ Can I schedule regular runs?

Yes. Use Apify Schedules to run this Actor on any cron interval (daily, weekly, monthly) and keep a downstream database in sync with new Open Targets releases.

⚖️ Is this data legal to use?

Open Targets data is published under CC0 with attribution. Underlying source data may carry separate licenses; review the Open Targets documentation for your specific use case.

💼 Can I use this data commercially?

Yes. Open Targets data is free for academic and commercial use. The CC0 license places it in the public domain.

💳 Do I need a paid Apify plan to use this Actor?

No. The free Apify plan is enough for testing and small runs (10 records per run). A paid plan lifts the limit and gives you access to scheduling and higher concurrency.

🔁 What happens if a run fails or gets interrupted?

Apify automatically retries transient errors. Single-entity failures are skipped with a warning and the run continues. Partial datasets are preserved.

🧪 What if I need full evidence trails?

This Actor returns the top-N association rows per target or disease. For deeper evidence and provenance, query individual entity pages on platform.opentargets.org or request a companion scraper through the contact form.

🆘 What if I need help?

Our support team is here to help. Contact us through the Apify platform or use the Tally form linked below.

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🔌 Integrate with any app

Open Targets Platform Scraper connects to any cloud service via Apify integrations:

• Make - Automate multi-step workflows
• Zapier - Connect with 5,000+ apps
• Slack - Get run notifications in your channels
• Airbyte - Pipe biomedical data into your warehouse
• GitHub - Trigger runs from commits and releases
• Google Drive - Export datasets straight to Sheets

You can also use webhooks to trigger downstream actions when a run finishes. Push refreshed biomedical evidence into your product backend or notebook environment.

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💡 Pro Tip: browse the complete ParseForge collection for more reference-data scrapers.

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🆘 Need Help? Open our contact form to request a new scraper, propose a custom data project, or report an issue.

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