The DrugBank database available at the University of Alberta

University of Alberta

The University of Alberta is a public research university located in Edmonton, Alberta, Canada. Founded in 1908 by Alexander Cameron Rutherford, the first premier of Alberta and Henry Marshall Tory, its first president, it is widely recognized as one of the best universities in Canada...

 is a bioinformatics

Bioinformatics

Bioinformatics is the application of computer science and information technology to the field of biology and medicine. Bioinformatics deals with algorithms, databases and information systems, web technologies, artificial intelligence and soft computing, information and computation theory, software...

 and cheminformatics

Cheminformatics

Cheminformatics is the use of computer and informational techniques, applied to a range of problems in the field of chemistry. These in silico techniques are used in pharmaceutical companies in the process of drug discovery...

 resource that combines detailed drug (i.e. chemical, pharmacological and pharmaceutical) data with comprehensive drug target (i.e. sequence, structure, pathway) information. The database contains nearly 4800 drug entries including:

• > 1480 FDA-approved small molecule drugs,
• 128 FDA-approved biotech (protein
  Protein
  Proteins are biochemical compounds consisting of one or more polypeptides typically folded into a globular or fibrous form, facilitating a biological function. A polypeptide is a single linear polymer chain of amino acids bonded together by peptide bonds between the carboxyl and amino groups of...
  
  /peptide
  Peptide
  Peptides are short polymers of amino acid monomers linked by peptide bonds. They are distinguished from proteins on the basis of size, typically containing less than 50 monomer units. The shortest peptides are dipeptides, consisting of two amino acids joined by a single peptide bond...
  
  ) drugs,
• > 71 nutraceutical
  Nutraceutical
  Nutraceutical, a portmanteau of the words “nutrition” and “pharmaceutical”, is a food or food product that reportedly provides health and medical benefits, including the prevention and treatment of disease. Health Canada defines the term as "a product isolated or purified from foods that is...
  
  s, and
• > 3200 experimental drugs.

More than 2500 protein (i.e. drug target, non-redundant) sequences are linked to these drug entries.

Each DrugCard entry contains more than 100 data fields with half of the information being devoted to drug/chemical data and the other half devoted to drug target or protein data.

It is maintained by David Wishart and Craig Knox.

Access

Users may query DrugBank in a number of ways:

• Simple text queries of the entire textual component of the database are supported. Clicking on the Browse button generates a tabular synopsis of DrugBank's content. This view allows users to casually scroll through the database or re-sort its contents.
• Clicking on a given DrugCard button brings up the full data content for the corresponding drug. A complete explanation of all the DrugCard fields and sources is given there.
• The PharmaBrowse button allows users to browse through drugs as grouped by their indication. This is particularly useful for pharmacists and physicians, but also for pharmaceutical researchers looking for potential drug leads.
• The ChemQuery button allows users to draw (using the MarvinSketch or ChemSketch applets) or write (as a 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 18,000 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. The Data Extractor is the most sophisticated search tool for DrugBank.
• Users may download selected text components and sequence data from DrugBank and track the latest DrugBank statistics by clicking on the Download button.

See also

• chemexper
• ChemSpider
  ChemSpider
  ChemsSpider is a free chemical database, owned by the Royal Society of Chemistry.-Database:The database contains more than 26 million unique molecules from over 400 data sources including those listed below.* A-L: EPA DSSTox, U.S...
  
  
• eMolecules
  EMolecules
  eMolecules is a search engine for chemical molecules. The system was first launched in November 2005.-Database:* The database contains more than 7.0M unique molecules from commercial suppliers, like Acros, ASINEX, ChemBridge, ChemDiv, Comgenex, Enamine Ltd, Fluka, InterBioScreen, Key Organics, Life...
  
  
• PubChem
  PubChem
  PubChem is a database of chemical molecules and their activities against biological assays. The system is maintained by the National Center for Biotechnology Information , a component of the National Library of Medicine, which is part of the United States National Institutes of Health . PubChem can...
  
  
• Therapeutic Targets Database
  Therapeutic Targets Database
  Therapeutic Target Database is a database provided by Bioinformatics and Drug Design Group in National University of Singapore, which provides information about the known and explored therapeutic protein and nucleic acid targets, the targeted disease, pathway information and the corresponding...