Open Targets
Birgit Kerber has extensive experience in business development and innovation within the life sciences sector. Currently serving as the Head of Innovation and Translation at EMBL Enterprise Management Technology Transfer GmbH since April 2001, Birgit oversees business development, alliances, and public-private partnerships. In addition to this role, Birgit has been the Business Development Lead at Open Targets since March 2015, focusing on fostering collaborations within a public-private initiative. At the European Bioinformatics Institute (EMBL-EBI), Birgit has been involved in business development since June 2009, supporting data sharing and research in computational biology. Birgit's earlier career includes a postdoctoral position at the European Molecular Biology Laboratory, where developmental molecular genetics was researched. Birgit holds a Diploma in Biology from The Philipp University of Marburg and a PhD in Molecular Genetics from the Max Planck Institute for Biophysical Chemistry, complemented by additional business and intellectual property qualifications.
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Open Targets
Open Targets is an innovative, large-scale, multi-year, public-private partnership that uses human genetics and genomics data for systematic drug target identification and prioritisation. Open Targets brings together complimentary expertise of our academic and industry partners, Bristol Myers Squibb, EMBL-EBI, Genentech, GSK, Pfizer, Wellcome Sanger Institute, and Sanofi. The freely available Open Targets Platform (platform.opentargets.org) makes it easy for researchers working in many disciplines to identify and prioritise therapeutic targets for new medicines. Open Targets Genetics (genetics.opentargets.org), is our portal for investigation of Genome Wide Association Study (GWAS) data to assist in identifying the causal genes to prioritise drug targets. The portal aggregates and merges genetic associations curated from literature and newly-derived loci from UK Biobank andn FinnGen with (open source) functional genomics data including epigenetics (e.g., chromatin conformation, chromatin interactions) and quantitative trait loci (e.g., eQTLs from GTEX, pQTL), and applies statistical fine-mapping across thousands of trait-associated loci, to resolve association signals and link each variant to its proximal and distal target gene(s), using a single evidence score. Open Targets complements data integration with large scale systematic experimental approaches to support target identification, prioritisation and validation, and is committed to sharing its data openly with the scientific community.