Drug Bank:An Update-Resource for in Silico Drug Discovery

Drug Bank plays a vital role in the research of bioinformatics/chemo informatics. Drug bank is a richly annotated resource that combines detailed drug data with comprehensive drug target and drug action information. Since its first release in the 2006, Drug Bank has been widely used to facilitate, in silico drug target discovery, drug design, drug docking or screening, drug metabolism prediction, drug interaction prediction and general pharmacological education. First drug bank was released in 2006 with version 1.0. Now it is successfully updated by the releasing of 2.0, 2.5 and 3.0 version. First released in 2006, Drug Bank has become widely used by pharmacists, medicinal chemists, pharmaceutical researchers, clinicians, educators and the general public . The database contains 6707 drug entries including 1436 FDA-approved small molecule drugs, 134 FDA-approved biotech (protein/peptide) drugs, 83 nutraceuticals and 5086 experimental drugs. Additionally, 4228 non-redundant protein (i.e. drug target/enzyme/transporter/carrier) sequences are linked to these drug entries. Each DrugCard entry contains more than 150 data fields with half of the information being devoted to drug/chemical data and the other half devoted to drug target or protein data. Since its last update in 2008, DrugBank has been greatly expanded through the addition of new drugs, new targets and the inclusion of more than 40 new data fields per drug entry (a 40% increase in data 'depth'). These data field additions include illustrated drug-action pathways, drug transporter data, drug metabolite data, pharmacogenomic data, adverse drug response data, ADMET data, pharmacokinetic data, computed property data and chemical classification data. Drug Bank 3.0 also offers expanded database links, improved search tools for drug-drug and food-drug interaction, new resources for querying and viewing drug pathways and hundreds of new drug entries with detailed patent, pricing and manufacturer data. These additions have been complemented by enhancements to the quality and quantity of existing data, particularly with regard to drug target, drug description and drug action data. Drug Bank 3.0 represents the result of 2 years of manual annotation work aimed at making the database much more useful for a wide range of 'Omics' (i.e. pharmacogenomic, pharmacoproteomic, pharmacometabolomic and even pharmacoeconomic) applications.