Database Commons
Database Commons

a catalog of worldwide biological databases

Database Profile

DrugBank

General information

URL: http://www.drugbank.ca
Full name: DrugBank - Drug and Drug Target Database
Description: DrugBank is a comprehensive online database containing extensive biochemical and pharmacological information about drugs,their mechanisms and their targets.
Year founded: 2006
Last update: 2023-11-11
Version: v6.0
Accessibility:
Accessible
Country/Region: Canada

Contact information

University/Institution: University of Alberta
Address: Edmonton, AB T6G 2E9, Canada
City: Edmonton
Province/State: AB
Country/Region: Canada
Contact name (PI/Team): DrugBank Team
Contact email (PI/Helpdesk): info@drugbank.ca

Publications

37953279
DrugBank 6.0: the DrugBank Knowledgebase for 2024. [PMID: 37953279]
Craig Knox, Mike Wilson, Christen M Klinger, Mark Franklin, Eponine Oler, Alex Wilson, Allison Pon, Jordan Cox, Na Eun Lucy Chin, Seth A Strawbridge, Marysol Garcia-Patino, Ray Kruger, Aadhavya Sivakumaran, Selena Sanford, Rahil Doshi, Nitya Khetarpal, Omolola Fatokun, Daphnee Doucet, Ashley Zubkowski, Dorsa Yahya Rayat, Hayley Jackson, Karxena Harford, Afia Anjum, Mahi Zakir, Fei Wang, Siyang Tian, Brian Lee, Jaanus Liigand, Harrison Peters, Ruo Qi Rachel Wang, Tue Nguyen, Denise So, Matthew Sharp, Rodolfo da Silva, Cyrella Gabriel, Joshua Scantlebury, Marissa Jasinski, David Ackerman, Timothy Jewison, Tanvir Sajed, Vasuk Gautam, David S Wishart

First released in 2006, DrugBank (https://go.drugbank.com) has grown to become the 'gold standard' knowledge resource for drug, drug-target and related pharmaceutical information. DrugBank is widely used across many diverse biomedical research and clinical applications, and averages more than 30 million views/year. Since its last update in 2018, we have been actively enhancing the quantity and quality of the drug data in this knowledgebase. In this latest release (DrugBank 6.0), the number of FDA approved drugs has grown from 2646 to 4563 (a 72% increase), the number of investigational drugs has grown from 3394 to 6231 (a 38% increase), the number of drug-drug interactions increased from 365 984 to 1 413 413 (a 300% increase), and the number of drug-food interactions expanded from 1195 to 2475 (a 200% increase). In addition to this notable expansion in database size, we have added thousands of new, colorful, richly annotated pathways depicting drug mechanisms and drug metabolism. Likewise, existing datasets have been significantly improved and expanded, by adding more information on drug indications, drug-drug interactions, drug-food interactions and many other relevant data types for 11 891 drugs. We have also added experimental and predicted MS/MS spectra, 1D/2D-NMR spectra, CCS (collision cross section), RT (retention time) and RI (retention index) data for 9464 of DrugBank's 11 710 small molecule drugs. These and other improvements should make DrugBank 6.0 even more useful to a much wider research audience ranging from medicinal chemists to metabolomics specialists to pharmacologists.

Nucleic Acids Res. 2024:52(D1) | 670 Citations (from Europe PMC, 2025-12-13)
29126136
DrugBank 5.0: a major update to the DrugBank database for 2018. [PMID: 29126136]
Wishart DS, Feunang YD, Guo AC, Lo EJ, Marcu A, Grant JR, Sajed T, Johnson D, Li C, Sayeeda Z, Assempour N, Iynkkaran I, Liu Y, Maciejewski A, Gale N, Wilson A, Chin L, Cummings R, Le D, Pon A, Knox C, Wilson M.

DrugBank (www.drugbank.ca) is a web-enabled database containing comprehensive molecular information about drugs, their mechanisms, their interactions and their targets. First described in 2006, DrugBank has continued to evolve over the past 12 years in response to marked improvements to web standards and changing needs for drug research and development. This year's update, DrugBank 5.0, represents the most significant upgrade to the database in more than 10 years. In many cases, existing data content has grown by 100% or more over the last update. For instance, the total number of investigational drugs in the database has grown by almost 300%, the number of drug-drug interactions has grown by nearly 600% and the number of SNP-associated drug effects has grown more than 3000%. Significant improvements have been made to the quantity, quality and consistency of drug indications, drug binding data as well as drug-drug and drug-food interactions. A great deal of brand new data have also been added to DrugBank 5.0. This includes information on the influence of hundreds of drugs on metabolite levels (pharmacometabolomics), gene expression levels (pharmacotranscriptomics) and protein expression levels (pharmacoprotoemics). New data have also been added on the status of hundreds of new drug clinical trials and existing drug repurposing trials. Many other important improvements in the content, interface and performance of the DrugBank website have been made and these should greatly enhance its ease of use, utility and potential applications in many areas of pharmacological research, pharmaceutical science and drug education.

Nucleic Acids Res. 2018:46(D1) | 5060 Citations (from Europe PMC, 2025-12-13)
24203711
DrugBank 4.0: shedding new light on drug metabolism. [PMID: 24203711]
Law V, Knox C, Djoumbou Y, Jewison T, Guo AC, Liu Y, Maciejewski A, Arndt D, Wilson M, Neveu V, Tang A, Gabriel G, Ly C, Adamjee S, Dame ZT, Han B, Zhou Y, Wishart DS.

DrugBank (http://www.drugbank.ca) is a comprehensive online database containing extensive biochemical and pharmacological information about drugs, their mechanisms and their targets. Since it was first described in 2006, DrugBank has rapidly evolved, both in response to user requests and in response to changing trends in drug research and development. Previous versions of DrugBank have been widely used to facilitate drug and in silico drug target discovery. The latest update, DrugBank 4.0, has been further expanded to contain data on drug metabolism, absorption, distribution, metabolism, excretion and toxicity (ADMET) and other kinds of quantitative structure activity relationships (QSAR) information. These enhancements are intended to facilitate research in xenobiotic metabolism (both prediction and characterization), pharmacokinetics, pharmacodynamics and drug design/discovery. For this release, >1200 drug metabolites (including their structures, names, activity, abundance and other detailed data) have been added along with >1300 drug metabolism reactions (including metabolizing enzymes and reaction types) and dozens of drug metabolism pathways. Another 30 predicted or measured ADMET parameters have been added to each DrugCard, bringing the average number of quantitative ADMET values for Food and Drug Administration-approved drugs close to 40. Referential nuclear magnetic resonance and MS spectra have been added for almost 400 drugs as well as spectral and mass matching tools to facilitate compound identification. This expanded collection of drug information is complemented by a number of new or improved search tools, including one that provides a simple analyses of drug-target, -enzyme and -transporter associations to provide insight on drug-drug interactions.

Nucleic Acids Res. 2014:42(Database issue) | 1321 Citations (from Europe PMC, 2025-12-13)
21059682
DrugBank 3.0: a comprehensive resource for 'omics' research on drugs. [PMID: 21059682]
Knox C, Law V, Jewison T, Liu P, Ly S, Frolkis A, Pon A, Banco K, Mak C, Neveu V, Djoumbou Y, Eisner R, Guo AC, Wishart DS.

DrugBank (http://www.drugbank.ca) is a richly annotated database of drug and drug target information. It contains extensive data on the nomenclature, ontology, chemistry, structure, function, action, pharmacology, pharmacokinetics, metabolism and pharmaceutical properties of both small molecule and large molecule (biotech) drugs. It also contains comprehensive information on the target diseases, proteins, genes and organisms on which these drugs act. First released in 2006, DrugBank has become widely used by pharmacists, medicinal chemists, pharmaceutical researchers, clinicians, educators and the general public. 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. DrugBank 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. DrugBank 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.

Nucleic Acids Res. 2011:39(Database issue) | 1201 Citations (from Europe PMC, 2025-12-13)
18048412
DrugBank: a knowledgebase for drugs, drug actions and drug targets. [PMID: 18048412]
Wishart DS, Knox C, Guo AC, Cheng D, Shrivastava S, Tzur D, Gautam B, Hassanali M.

DrugBank is a richly annotated resource that combines detailed drug data with comprehensive drug target and drug action information. Since its first release in 2006, DrugBank 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 pharmaceutical education. The latest version of DrugBank (release 2.0) has been expanded significantly over the previous release. With approximately 4900 drug entries, it now contains 60% more FDA-approved small molecule and biotech drugs including 10% more 'experimental' drugs. Significantly, more protein target data has also been added to the database, with the latest version of DrugBank containing three times as many non-redundant protein or drug target sequences as before (1565 versus 524). Each DrugCard entry now contains more than 100 data fields with half of the information being devoted to drug/chemical data and the other half devoted to pharmacological, pharmacogenomic and molecular biological data. A number of new data fields, including food-drug interactions, drug-drug interactions and experimental ADME data have been added in response to numerous user requests. DrugBank has also significantly improved the power and simplicity of its structure query and text query searches. DrugBank is available at http://www.drugbank.ca.

Nucleic Acids Res. 2008:36(Database issue) | 1736 Citations (from Europe PMC, 2025-12-13)
16381955
DrugBank: a comprehensive resource for in silico drug discovery and exploration. [PMID: 16381955]
Wishart DS, Knox C, Guo AC, Shrivastava S, Hassanali M, Stothard P, Chang Z, Woolsey J.

DrugBank is a unique bioinformatics/cheminformatics resource that combines detailed drug (i.e. chemical) data with comprehensive drug target (i.e. protein) information. The database contains >4100 drug entries including >800 FDA approved small molecule and biotech drugs as well as >3200 experimental drugs. Additionally, >14,000 protein or drug target sequences are linked to these drug entries. Each DrugCard entry contains >80 data fields with half of the information being devoted to drug/chemical data and the other half devoted to drug target or protein data. Many data fields are hyperlinked to other databases (KEGG, PubChem, ChEBI, PDB, Swiss-Prot and GenBank) and a variety of structure viewing applets. The database is fully searchable supporting extensive text, sequence, chemical structure and relational query searches. Potential applications of DrugBank include in silico drug target discovery, drug design, drug docking or screening, drug metabolism prediction, drug interaction prediction and general pharmaceutical education. DrugBank is available at http://redpoll.pharmacy.ualberta.ca/drugbank/.

Nucleic Acids Res. 2006:34(Database issue) | 2348 Citations (from Europe PMC, 2025-12-13)

Ranking

All databases:
26/6895 (99.637%)
Health and medicine:
7/1738 (99.655%)
26
Total Rank
11,606
Citations
610.842
z-index

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Not Rated
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Record metadata

Created on: 2015-06-20
Curated by:
Shiting Wang [2024-08-21]
Zhang Zhang [2022-08-12]
Nashaiman Pervaiz [2018-12-28]
[2018-11-30]
Lina Ma [2018-08-26]
Lina Ma [2018-06-08]
Lina Ma [2016-04-07]
Jian Sang [2016-04-04]
Jian Sang [2015-12-07]
Jian Sang [2015-06-28]
Jian Sang [2015-06-27]