Chemistry Central Blog
DrugBank continues to offer open access drug information
The DrugBank database is a freely available, bioinformatics and cheminformatics resource that combines chemical, pharmacological and pharmaceutical drug data with comprehensive drug target (i.e. protein) information.
The database, designed and created by Dr David Wishart of Alberta University, Canada, presently contains around "4300 drug entries including [over] 1,000 FDA-approved small molecule drugs, 113 FDA-approved biotech (protein/peptide) drugs, 62 nutraceuticals and [over] 3,000 experimental drugs. [In addition]... more than 6,000 protein (i.e. drug target) sequences are linked to these drug entries."
The entry cards for each drug, or DrugCards, contain around 80 data fields. The drug or compound information includes details on mechanism of action, pharmacology, and related metabolising enzymes; whilst the information held related to the drug target or receptor includes details on target pathways, the location of the target chromosome and the DNA sequence of the target. A table listing the principal entry card data fields can viewed here.
The database can be queried using a number of search options: "[t]he PharmaBrowse button allows users to browse through drugs as grouped by their indication... useful for pharmacists and physicians, but also for pharmaceutical researchers looking for potential drug leads. The ChemQuery button allows users to draw (using a ChemSketch applet) or write (SMILES string) a chemical compound and to search DrugBank for chemicals similar or identical to the query compound. The TextQuery button supports a more sophisticated text search (partial word matches, case sensitive, misspellings, etc) of the text portion of DrugBank. The SeqSearch button allows users to conduct BLASTP (protein) sequence searches of the 15,000 sequences contained in DrugBank. Both single and multiple sequence (i.e. whole proteome) BLAST queries are supported. The Data Extractor button opens an easy-to-use relational query search tool that allows users to select or search over various combinations of subfields." In addition, there is also a 'download option' that allows users to download selected text components and sequence data from the database, and also track the latest DrugBank statistics.
A more detailed summation of DrugBank, written by its architects, can be found here.
Posted by Gino D'Oca at 14:51 Comments (1)
Posted by R&D Chemicals on January 08, 2008 at 01:13 PM GMT #