What A Disease Is Made Of Screensaver
The What A Disease Is Made Of screensaver shows target–disease association scores from the Open Targets Platform, read live and key-less. It's free, runs in your browser, and ESC exits.
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Press ESC to leave fullscreen. Settings are saved in your browser only.
How the What A Disease Is Made Of screensaver works
The saver reads the source described above and draws it on a canvas — no account, no tracking.
Target–disease association scores from the Open Targets Platform, read live and key-less. Genetics, expression, animal models, drugs and literature pooled into one score per gene. Thousands of genes associate with any common disease; a handful score high.
It refreshes on a schedule, so what you see stays current.
Colours and any options can be changed in settings; nothing is stored beyond your own browser.
How association scores are built
The Open Targets Platform is a free tool built by the Open Targets consortium, a public-private partnership founded in 2014 by EMBL’s European Bioinformatics Institute, the Wellcome Sanger Institute and GSK, with other pharmaceutical companies joining later. It links genes, called targets, to diseases by integrating public datasets on genetics, somatic mutations, drugs, pathways, expression, animal models and the literature.
Scores come from a harmonic sum. Within a data source, evidence scores are sorted from highest to lowest, each is divided by its rank squared, and the total is normalised to fall between 0 and 1. The same method then combines sources, after each is multiplied by a weight; Europe PMC, Expression Atlas and IMPC carry a weight of 0.2 and Cancer Biomarkers and OTAR Projects 0.5. Diseases come from the EFO ontology, so an indirect association also counts evidence for more specific child diseases.
The platform states that scores rank associations and are not confidence values or probabilities. A high score means evidence has accumulated, not that a gene causes the disease or that a drug aimed at it would work. Well-studied diseases gather more evidence, and the platform is updated with quarterly releases.
A worked example
Target–disease association scores from the Open Targets Platform, read live and key-less. Genetics, expression, animal models, drugs and literature pooled into one score per gene. Thousands of genes associate with any common disease; a handful score high.
Settings & tips
- Accent and Background recolour the display.
- Every value on screen comes from the live source — nothing is simulated.
- Press ESC to leave fullscreen.
Frequently asked questions
- Is this real data?
- Yes — it comes from the source named on this page and is refreshed on a schedule.
- Is a key needed?
- No. This source is fully key-less.
- Is it free?
- Yes, and it runs entirely in your browser.
- Is a score a probability?
- No. Open Targets says scores are for ranking associations and are not confidence or probability values. A score of 0.8 is not an eighty percent chance of anything.
- Does a high score mean a good drug target?
- Not necessarily. It reflects how much evidence links a gene to a disease, while whether a protein can be safely and effectively targeted is a separate question.
- Why do well-known diseases have more high scores?
- More research produces more evidence, which raises scores. Open Targets notes that low-scoring targets in under-studied diseases can still be important leads.