ONTOFORCE’s DISQOVER chosen by The Michael J. Fox Foundation to enhance the integration and access of Parkinson’s disease research data

Ghent, Belgium, 3 April, 2025 – ONTOFORCE, a leader in semantic technology for the life sciences industry, has announced a collaboration with The Michael J. Fox Foundation for Parkinson’s Research (MJFF). DISQOVER, ONTOFORCE’s advanced knowledge discovery platform, will support MJFF’s Targets to Therapies Initiative, a program aimed to expand the number of promising, druggable biological targets within the Parkinson’s disease (PD) translational pipeline. The project will establish a centralized knowledge portal that aggregates, organizes, and visualizes critical data on potential therapeutic targets, reducing barriers to data access and accelerating research processes. 

Launched in early 2024, MJFF’s Targets to Therapies Initiative is designed to identify, validate, and de-risk promising biological targets linked to Parkinson’s pathogenesis. A key component of this initiative is the development of an advanced knowledge platform to serve as a central hub for information and data related to promising targets for the Parkinson’s disease research community. DISQOVER will seamlessly integrate disparate data sources to provide an active, evolving list of prioritized targets, a structured scorecard system for ranking targets, access to experimental validation data, and additional resources. 

The DISQOVER platform is positioned to support MJFF due to its ability to integrate heterogenous data, track fine-grain data provenance, semantically connect data concepts, and visualize data through an easy-to-use and interactive user interface. Through the Targets to Therapies Initiative, DISQOVER will aggregate relevant target data from public and proprietary sources, standardize and structure data into packages for easy consumption by researchers, and enable insight discovery through dynamic data visualization capabilities. Ultimately, DISQOVER will help remove barriers to data, reduce redundancy, and improve transparency in the Parkinson’s disease research community.  

"ONTOFORCE is dedicated to improving data accessibility so that researchers and scientists can focus on the important work that will help drive research forward,” said Valerie Morel, CEO of ONTOFORCE. “By applying DISQOVER’s powerful capabilities to The Michael J. Fox Foundation’s Targets to Therapies Initiative, we are supporting the Parkinson’s disease research community to find and access the target data they need efficiently." 

“Leveraging cutting edge technology in Parkinson’s research and fostering a collaboration with global experts is one of the many ways MJFF works toward unlocking new ideas and paving the way toward new and better treatments into the hands of patients,” said Shalini Padmanabhan, PhD, senior vice president of discovery and translational research at MJFF. “We look forward to partnering with ONTOFORCE and disseminating a consolidated public knowledge base on emerging therapeutic PD targets in 2025, which will support drug developers and researchers on this critical work of speeding druggable targets.” 

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About ONTOFORCE 

ONTOFORCE helps life sciences organizations accelerate research and drug development by unlocking hidden insights from data. Founded on semantic technology and an ontology-based knowledge graph, their flagship product, DISQOVER, is a knowledge discovery platform developed specifically for the life sciences industry. DISQOVER seamlessly connects an organization’s internal, siloed data with licensed data and public data in one easy-to-use, customizable platform.        

DISQOVER is deployed by many leading pharmaceutical and biotechnology companies. Users include scientific researchers, bioinformaticians, data scientists, and many other roles.     

ONTOFORCE is headquartered in Ghent, Belgium and has a secondary office in the United States in Cambridge, Massachusetts.      

About Targets to Therapies 

The Michael J. Fox Foundation for Parkinson’s Research (MJFF) launched Targets to Therapies in 2024 to leverage the global research community’s expertise and characterize previously underexplored, druggable targets for Parkinson’s disease (PD). While a number of high-profile targets like synuclein, GBA and LRRK2 have picked up momentum in the PD space, hundreds more targets remain untapped, offering immense potential for drug development. Targets to Therapies convenes experts from all over the world to push the field forward by characterizing the most promising targets, laying the groundwork for future drug development. The initiative will make its findings public, paving the way for well-informed study in the future. Learn more here.