The DrugBank database is a unique bioinformatics and cheminformatics 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 6811 drug entries including 1528 FDA-approved small molecule drugs, 150 FDA-approved biotech (protein/peptide) drugs, 87 nutraceuticals and 5080 experimental drugs. Additionally, 4294 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.

Users may query DrugBank in any number of ways. The simple text query (above) supports general text queries of the entire textual component of the database. Clicking on the Browse button (on the DrugBank navigation panel above) generates a tabular synopsis of DrugBank’s content. This browse 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 here. 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 MarvinSketch applet or 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 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.

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