Open Targets Platform

I’m a Londoner, born and raised (mostly). For my undergraduate degree, I stayed in London and studied Biological Sciences at UCL. I then followed this up with a Bioinformatics MSc at the University of Copenhagen and a PhD at the University of Cambridge. For my PhD, I was based in the Anderson group at the Wellcome Sanger Institute and my thesis revolved around integrating population-scale single-cell transcriptomic data with germline genetics to better understand the biology of inflammatory bowel diseases. I joined Open Targets as a single-cell data scientist in 2024.

Follow me on Twitter to keep up with my science!

Manuel studied computer science at the University of Murcia, with degrees in Computer Science, New Information and Communication Technologies, and Information Technologies and Advanced Telematics.

He started his professional career at the University, working as a Systems Administrator. He has then moved through different roles, from network architect and security official to software engineer, joining EMBL’s European Bioinformatics Institute in 2016.

After working in the Proteomics team and the Biomodels team, Manuel joined the Open Targets back end team, working on our cloud infrastructure and data analysis pipelines, and delivering engineering magic using Terraform, Google Cloud, Scala and Spark.

Annalisa joined Open Targets as a product manager in June 2022.

She first joined EMBL-EBI in 2017 as part of the GWAS Catalog, where she curated genetic evidence to improve target identification and prioritisation.

Before starting her role at EBI, Annalisa conducted her predoctoral and postdoctoral research in Genetics of Sensory Function at EMBL Rome, Wellcome Sanger Institute and King’s College London.

Annalisa holds a PhD in Medical Genetics and a M.Sc. in Pharmaceutical Chemistry from the University of Naples, Italy.

Get in touch with Annalisa if you have questions about the Open Targets bioinformatics products and stakeholders.

Carlos is a Web Developer for Open Targets. He is involved in the day-to-day maintenance of the web platforms, the improvements of the final user experience, and the implementation of new features.

He is also constantly looking for better development experience, besides modern technologies, to offer a cutting-edge project.

Carlos enjoys building data visualisations and modern platforms tools for scientific and research purposes, and he has worked in diverse data-driven industries, from IoT (Internet of things) to Healthcare.

Ricardo Esteban Martinez Osorio is a full stack developer working across the Open Targets Platform and Genetics teams.

Javier is a Backend Software Developer in the Open Targets core team.

James joined Open Targets in 2023 as a software developer working in the back-end team. He previously worked in the Samples, phenotypes, and ontologies team at EMBL-EBI.

Vivien is a bioinformatician in the Open Targets data team. She joined the team in July 2024.

Irene is a bioinformatician working on the Open Targets Platform and Open Targets Genetics. She joined the team in 2020.

Graham McNeill is a web developer in the Open Targets front-end team. He joined in 2024.

Chintan joined Open Targets in 2022 as a web developer in the front-end team. Chintan is involved in developing and improving the Open Targets Platform and Genetics.

Prior to joining Open Targets, Chintan was focused on creating interactive digital experiences on the web and worked on various web technologies like Angular, React, Salesforce Commerce Cloud.

David Ochoa joined Open Targets in 2019 as Platform Coordinator.

David is involved in setting the scientific strategy for the OT Platform and related projects, day to day management of core database projects - including the team that generates the OT Platform - and setting priorities in line with agreed strategy together with Project Management.

Prior to joining Open Targets, David obtained his PhD while using computational methods and network biology for predicting protein-protein interactions. After graduating, he joined as a postdoctoral fellow the group of Pedro Beltrao at EMBL-EBI to better understand human signalling under perturbation and disease by leveraging the growing body of large-scale proteomics data and the latest computational approaches in data analysis and machine learning.

Daniel obtained a PhD in structural biochemistry from Eötvös Loránd University, studying charged single alpha helices, a protein structural motif, using various biophysical methods.

Following this, he undertook postgradual work at the Univeristy of California, San Francisco. While at UCSF, he studied the HER family of receptor tyrosine kinases that play critical roles in cancer development, establishing an experimental in vitro system to study structure-function relationships of these proteins.

He has been working as a Senior Bioinformatician on the Wellcome Genome Campus since 2015, first within the Wellcome Sanger Institute’s Analytical Genomics of Complex Traits research group, then in EMBL-EBI’s GWAS Catalog developr team.

He now leads the data team at Open Targets, who develop and maintain the data processing and integration pipelines, and actively develop our data models to ensure Open Targets’ informatics tools provide the most relevant answers to our users.

Kirill is a senior bioinformatician in the Open Targets data team. He joined Open Targets in 2021 from EMBL-EBI’s European Variation Archive team.

Kirill previously worked as head of bioinformatics for Genotek, which he joined after completing a degree in Bioengineering and Bioinformatics at Lomonosov Moscow State University (MSU).

Prashant is the Project Manager for Open Targets Platform and Open Targets Genetics. He is responsible for leading the project management strategy and ensuring timely deployment on the products as per the release cycles and quality criteria. Prashant is always looking to interact with stakeholders both from academia and the industry.

Prior to joining open targets, Prashant was working with a life sciences MLOps startup. He has also worked for various global pharmaceutical organisations as well as niche biotech companies in the informatics and data science domain.