G2DR: A Genotype-First Framework for Genetics-Informed Target Prioritization and Drug Repurposing
Organizations: School of Chemistry and Molecular Biology, The University of Queensland, Queen Street, 4067, Queensland, Australia · Computational Biology and Clinical Informatics, Baker Heart and Diabetes Institute, Commercial Road, 3004, Victoria, Australia
Abstract
Human genetics offers a promising route to therapeutic discovery, yet practical frameworks translating genotype-derived signal into ranked target and drug hypotheses remain limited, particularly when matched disease transcriptomics are unavailable. Here we present G2DR, a genotype-first prioritization framework propagating inherited variation through genetically predicted expression, multi-method gene-level testing, pathway enrichment, network context, druggability, and multi-source drug--target evidence integration. In a migraine case study with 733 UK Biobank participants under stratified five-fold cross-validation, we imputed expression across seven transcriptome-weight resources and ranked genes using a reproducibility-aware discovery score from training and validation data, followed by a balanced integrated score for target selection. Discovery-based prioritization generalized to held-out data, achieving gene-level ROC-AUC of 0.775 and PR-AUC of 0.475, while retaining enrichment for curated migraine biology. Mapping prioritized genes to compounds via Open Targets, DGIdb, and ChEMBL yielded drug sets enriched for migraine-linked compounds relative to a global background, though recovery favoured broader mechanism-linked and off-label space over migraine-specific approved therapies. Directionality filtering separated broadly recovered compounds from mechanistically compatible candidates. G2DR is a modular framework for genetics-informed hypothesis generation, not a clinically actionable recommendation system. All outputs require independent experimental, pharmacological, and clinical validation.
Figures & tables
| Model | Source | Description | Gene–Tissue Pairs |
|---|---|---|---|
| MASHR | https://zenodo.org/records/7551845 | Multivariate adaptive shrinkage models for cross-population transcriptome prediction, designed to improve TWAS performance in underrepresented populations Araujo et al. (2023) | 686,241 (49 tissues) |
| JTI | https://zenodo.org/records/3842289 | Joint-tissue imputation models that borrow information across tissues via shared genetic regulation, enabling both expression prediction and downstream causal inference Zhou et al. (2020) | 533,141 (49 tissues) |
| CTIMP | https://github.com/yiminghu/CTIMP | Cross-tissue gene-expression imputation models trained with sparse group-LASSO to borrow information across GTEx tissues Hu et al. (2019) | 404,450 (49 tissues) |
| UTMOST | https://zenodo.org/records/3842289 | Cross-tissue transcriptome prediction models from the UTMOST framework, hosted alongside JTI models; treated as a separate model set in this study Hu et al. (2019) | 340,104 (49 tissues) |
| EpiXcan | https://www.synapse.org/Synapse:syn52745052 | Transcriptome imputation incorporating epigenomic annotations to weight SNP priors, improving prediction accuracy over standard elastic net Zhang et al. (2019) | 143,609 (14 tissues) |
| FUSION | http://gusevlab.org/projects/fusion/ | Bayesian sparse linear mixed model and penalized regression framework for transcriptome-wide association studies Gusev et al. (2016) | 265,052 (48 tissues) |
| Predicted set | TP | FP | FN | Precision | Recall |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| (train val) | 4,995 | 4,310 | 2,146 | 0.537 | 0.699 |
| Top 50 | 39 | 11 | 7,102 | 0.780 | 0.005 |
| Top 100 | 79 | 21 | 7,062 | 0.790 | 0.011 |
| Top 200 | 156 | 44 | 6,985 | 0.780 | 0.022 |
| Top 500 | 347 | 153 | 6,794 | 0.694 | 0.049 |
| Top 1000 | 664 | 336 | 6,477 | 0.664 | 0.093 |
| Test positives ( ) | Curated migraine genes ( ) | |||||||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Set | FE | -value | FE | -value | ||||||
| (train val) | 9,305 | 4,995 | 1,934.13 | 2.58 | 9,305 | 1,189 | 864.01 | 1.38 | ||
| Top 50 | 50 | 39 | 10.39 | 3.75 | 50 | 12 | 4.64 | 2.58 | ||
| Top 100 | 100 | 79 | 20.79 | 3.80 | 100 | 21 | 9.29 | 2.26 | ||
| Top 200 | 200 | 156 | 41.57 | 3.75 | 200 | 36 | 18.57 | 1.94 | ||
| Top 500 | 500 | 347 | 103.93 | 3.34 | 500 | 74 | 46.43 | 1.59 | ||
| Tier | Top-20 | Top-50 | Top-100 | Prec@100 | Rec@100 | FE@100 | @100 | Top-200 |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Tier 1: Migraine-specific approved | 0 | 0 | 0 | 0.00 | 0.000 | 0.00 | 1.00 | 0 |
| Tier 2: Guideline-supported | 0 | 1 | 2 | 0.02 | 0.022 | 30.35 | 2 | |
| Tier 3: Established off-label | 1 | 1 | 1 | 0.01 | 0.034 | 48.14 | 1 | |
| Tier 4: Broad literature-linked | 4 | 18 | 48 | 0.48 | 0.011 | 14.67 | 86 |
| Directionality class | All pairs ( ) | Migraine drugs only ( ) | |||
| Count | % | Count | % | ||
| Consistent | 549 | 11.3% | 50 | 8.1% | |
| Inconsistent | 618 | 12.7% | 83 | 13.5% | |
| Unclear | 76.0% | 481 | 78.3% | ||
| Total | 100.0% | 614 | 100.0% | ||
| Drug rank | Drug | Gene | Gene rank | Disease direction | Drug action | Evidence source | Approved | Known migraine gene |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 26 | Aspirin | GSTP1 | 31 | Higher in cases | Inhibitor | ChEMBL | Yes | Yes |
| 126 | Digoxin | ATP1A4 | 2 | Higher in cases | Inhibitor | DGIdb | Yes | Yes |
| 133 | Digitoxin | ATP1A4 | 2 | Higher in cases | Inhibitor | DGIdb | Yes | Yes |
| 142 | Exenatide | ALPL | 6 | Lower in cases | Agonist | DGIdb | Yes | No |
| 144 | Liraglutide | ALPL | 6 | Lower in cases | Agonist | DGIdb | Yes | No |
| 146 | Semaglutide | ALPL | 6 | Lower in cases | Agonist | DGIdb | Yes | No |
| Rank | Symbol | CombScore | ImpScore | Disease direction | KnMig | Confidence tier | Hits | Tissues | DBs | NDrugs | ApprDrug | DirBest |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | APOBEC3G | 0.936 | 0.435 | Higher in cases | No | Tier3_Exploratory | 100 | 29 | 1 | 98 | Yes | Unclear |
| 2 | ATP1A4 | 0.934 | 0.531 | Higher in cases | Yes | Tier3_Exploratory | 18 | 3 | 3 | 24 | Yes | Consistent |
| 3 | HLA-DQB1 | 0.933 | 0.410 | Lower in cases | Yes | Tier2_Moderate | 32 | 15 | 2 | 55 | Yes | Inconsistent |
| 4 | PSMB5 | 0.932 | 0.413 | Lower in cases | No | Tier2_Moderate | 40 | 13 | 2 | 33 | Yes | Inconsistent |
| 5 | SLC1A1 | 0.932 | 0.491 | Lower in cases | No | Tier2_Moderate | 103 | 15 | 2 | 54 | Yes | Inconsistent |
| 6 | ALPL | 0.931 | 0.412 | Lower in cases | No | Tier1_High | 35 | 5 | 1 | 96 | Yes | Consistent |
| Rank | Drug | Phase | KnMig | Approved | NTarg | Target genes | Disease directions | Directionality | Evidence sources |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Ataluren | APPROVED | No | Yes | 4 | RPL28, RPS14, RPL12, RPS16 | Unclear, lower | Unclear | DGIdb, OpenTargets |
| 2 | Metformin | APPROVED | Yes | Yes | 2 | NDUFV1, NDUFS6 | Lower in cases | Inconsistent | OpenTargets, DGIdb |
| 3 | Voxelotor | APPROVED | No | Yes | 1 | HBB | Lower in cases | Unclear | OpenTargets |
| 4 | Dibotermin alfa | APPROVED | No | Yes | 1 | BMPR1B | Higher in cases | Inconsistent | OpenTargets |
| 5 | Amantadine | APPROVED | No | Yes | 1 | GRIN2B | Lower in cases | Inconsistent | OpenTargets |
| 6 | Lifitegrast | APPROVED | No | Yes | 2 | ITGB2, ICAM1 | Higher in cases | Consistent | OpenTargets |
Appendix figures & tables6 assets
Supplementary material from the paper’s appendix.
Appendix
| Scheme | DE | Path | Drug | Hub | Spearman | Top-100 overlap (%) | DISC ROC-AUC | FULL ROC-AUC |
| (A) Reasonable alternative schemes | ||||||||
| Default (reference) | 0.45 | 0.25 | 0.25 | 0.05 | 1.000 | 100.0 | 0.546 | 0.776 |
| DE-heavy | 0.60 | 0.15 | 0.20 | 0.05 | 0.978 | 84.0 | 0.546 | 0.776 |
| Pathway-heavy | 0.30 | 0.40 | 0.25 | 0.05 | 0.951 | 78.0 | 0.545 | 0.775 |
| Drug-heavy | 0.30 | 0.25 | 0.40 | 0.05 | 0.962 | 82.0 | 0.546 | 0.775 |
| Equal weights (no hub) | 0.33 | 0.33 | 0.33 | 0.00 | 0.941 | 77.0 | 0.545 | 0.775 |
| Threshold rule | Train | Validation | Test | ROC-AUC | PR-AUC | FE test | FE migraine | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| FDR , | 1,046 | 9,107 | 7,141 | 9,305 | 0.7753 | 0.4754 | 2.58 | 1.38 |
| FDR , | 958 | 7,861 | 5,313 | 8,135 | 0.7314 | 0.3412 | 2.62 | 1.39 |
| FDR , | 263 | 6,241 | 4,599 | 6,303 | 0.7339 | 0.3289 | 3.20 | 1.39 |
| FDR , | 248 | 5,709 | 3,772 | 5,794 | 0.7025 | 0.2497 | 3.12 | 1.41 |
| Component | FE | ||||
| (A) Expression-weight databases | |||||
| MASHR | 187 | 40 | 17.40 | 2.30 | |
| JTI | 104 | 18 | 9.68 | 1.86 | |
| FUSION | 9,146 | 1,156 | 851.16 | 1.36 | |
| EpiXcan | 34 | 5 | 3.16 | 1.58 | |
| CTIMP | 16 | 2 | 1.49 | 1.34 | |
| AUC metrics | Top-200 test | Top-200 migraine | ||||||
| Ranking | T ROC | T PR | K ROC | K PR | Obs | FE | Obs | FE |
| (A) Full universe ( genes; non-discovery genes scored as 0) | ||||||||
| Significance only | 0.776 | 0.477 | 0.557 | 0.107 | 146 | 3.51 | 25 | 1.35 |
| Effect only | 0.790 | 0.526 | 0.558 | 0.111 | 145 | 3.49 | 37 | 1.99 |
| Primary composite ( ) | 0.775 | 0.475 | 0.557 | 0.109 | 156 | 3.75 | 36 | 1.94 |
| Pathway only | 0.549 | 0.265 | 0.520 | 0.108 | 150 | 3.61 | 66 | 3.55 |
| Universe | Overlap | Prec@K | Rec@K | F1@K | Expected | FE | ||||
| Top- input genes | ||||||||||
| 200 | ALL_DRUGS | 20 | 139,597 | 4,824 | 5 | 0.250 | 0.001036 | 0.002064 | 0.691 | 7.235 |
| 200 | ALL_DRUGS | 50 | 139,597 | 4,824 | 20 | 0.400 | 0.004146 | 0.008207 | 1.728 | 11.575 |
| 200 | ALL_DRUGS | 100 | 139,597 | 4,824 | 51 | 0.510 | 0.010572 | 0.020715 | 3.456 | 14.758 |
| 200 | ALL_DRUGS | 200 | 139,597 | 4,824 | 89 | 0.445 | 0.018449 | 0.035430 | 6.911 | 12.877 |
| 200 | ALL_DRUGS | 500 | 139,597 | 4,824 | 205 | 0.410 | 0.042496 | 0.077010 | 17.278 | 11.865 |
| Metric | G2DR (all genes) | G2DR (target-filtered) | Open Targets |
|---|---|---|---|
| Ranked / returned genes | 9,305 | 823 | 2,376 |
| Reference genes recovered | 1,189 | 464 | 1,228 |
| Reference recovery (%) | 37.27 | 14.55 | 38.50 |
| Shared with Open Targets | 823 | 823 | – |
| Shared with Open Targets and reference | 464 | 464 | 464 |
| Reference genes recovered but absent from Open Targets | 725 | 0 | – |
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