DrugBank Tutorial

For up to date issues or problems with this database please see the wiki.
For more information, please visit the DrugBank Database.

The DrugBank database is an information resource that combines detailed drug (i.e. chemical, pharmacological and pharmaceutical) data with comprehensive drug target (i.e. sequence, structure, and pathway) information. The database contains nearly over 4000 drug entries including FDA-approved small molecule drugs, FDA-approved biotech (protein/peptide) drugs, nutraceuticals and experimental drugs.  Additionally, non-redundant protein (i.e. drug target) sequences are linked to these FDA approved 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.

From NIF, users can find much of this information by searching for concepts, which have drugs associated with them.  Search results should appear if one is to search for any of the neurotransmitters, e.g. dopamine, or disorders, e.g. anxiety disorder see below:

The user may chose to autocomplete or just use free text.  The autocomplete feature in NIF comes from the NeuroLex, a lexicon of neuroscience-specific many of which have synonyms, acronyms and other relationships encoded, thus it may benefit the user to use the autocomplete where it seems appropriate because the search has the potential of being more  powerful.

For the key word anxiety, in the database tab under the category Drugs, results from the DrugBank can be found.  Drug names, types, categories, and short descriptions can be seen in the NIF interface.

Clicking on the first Drug Name leads to the following page within the DrugBank database:

Note, there is much more data that was not visible in the NIF interface about each drug, including assession numbers, synonyms, chemical structure, IUPAC names as well as receptor information, mechanism of action, side effects, trade names and many other fields that are also not shown.

For more information, please visit the DrugBank Database.