Drug Database Goes On Air

People were not aware about dugs and its effect till 1980. But now things have changed in this fast paced world. There is a lot of information available from varied sources such as textbooks, articles published in journals and databases.

The information that is available in these formats has to be concised for the general public’s understanding and should be made accessible. This was done by Dr. David Wishart, faculty of Pharmaceutical Sciences, along with his other colleague from the departments of Computing Science and Biological Sciences.

All this provides the latest information on the molecular and chemical aspects of the drugs and its effect on the human body. He initially created a database, which was very interactive and user friendly for teaching his students at the university of Alberta.

He worked on it to develop the database, which eventually resulted in this free online drug database. This provided detailed information about the various drugs, their targets, chemical, molecular, medical information related to the drugs. About 3000 drug targets and 4100 approved and experimental drugs are discussed in detail.

It is very useful to a number of people from various fields such as pharmacists, physicians, drug researchers and the general public. This is one of a kind drug database available so far.

The drug bank gives detailed information about each and every drug present in the market their brand names, chemical structures, protein and DNA sequences, links to relevant Internet sites, prescription information and detailed patient information.

Today the patient wants to know about the various treatment modalities and other latest developments in the field of science. Hence this database will be of great use to the patients than getting information through searching and understanding the various scientific literatures.

For a given drug the various brand names under which they are available, the brand name mixture that contains it, its side effects, and the mechanism of metabolisation of the drug are some of the information provided by the drug database.

The database also provides information about the researches conducted on the drug, compare drug structures, help in the study of new targets, understand drug mechanism and discover new drug leads.

Drug Bank combines the information generated by the Human Genome Project along with detailed information about drugs and drug products. The difficulties faced by the researchers are that the information available on these drugs is available on paper and gathering the information posed a lot of difficulty.

It was very time consuming as to obtain the information one has to go through a large volume of book, journals and electronic databases. These have to be searched, accessed, compared, written or run over which took about four years for the database to be complete.

Drug Bank is also lending a helping hand to The Human Metabolome Project. This database will support information on all the metabolites in the body fluids (urine and serum). Metabolites are chemicals, which are naturally synthesized in our body.

On the other hand drugs, which are given externally are also present in the body fluids. This database is created in order to show the differentiation in the normal metabolites and the amount of drugs present in the body fluids.

The development of The Human Metabolome Project is funded by Genome Alberta, through the Genome Canada project.