Database Commons

a catalog of worldwide biological databases

The development of new drugs for diseases is a time-consuming, costly and risky process. In recent years, many drugs could be approved for other indications. This repurposing process allows to effectively reduce development costs, time and, ultimately, save patients' lives. During the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic, drug repositioning has gained widespread attention as a fast opportunity to find potential treatments against the newly emerging disease. In order to expand this field to researchers with varying levels of experience, we made an effort to open it to all users (meaning novices as well as experts in cheminformatics) by significantly improving the entry-level user experience. The browsing functionality can be used as a global entry point to collect further information with regards to small molecules (∼1 million), side-effects (∼110 000) or drug-target interactions (∼3 million). The drug-repositioning tab for small molecules will also suggest possible drug-repositioning opportunities to the user by using structural similarity measurements for small molecules using two different approaches. Additionally, using information from the Promiscuous 2.0 Database, lists of candidate drugs for given indications were precomputed, including a section dedicated to potential treatments for COVID-19. All the information is interconnected by a dynamic network-based visualization to identify new indications for available compounds. Promiscuous 2.0 is unique in its functionality and is publicly available at http://bioinformatics.charite.de/promiscuous2.

The procedure of drug approval is time-consuming, costly and risky. Accidental findings regarding multi-specificity of approved drugs led to block-busters in new indication areas. Therefore, the interest in systematically elucidating new areas of application for known drugs is rising. Furthermore, the knowledge, understanding and prediction of so-called off-target effects allow a rational approach to the understanding of side-effects. With PROMISCUOUS we provide an exhaustive set of drugs (25,000), including withdrawn or experimental drugs, annotated with drug-protein and protein-protein relationships (21,500/104,000) compiled from public resources via text and data mining including manual curation. Measures of structural similarity for drugs as well as known side-effects can be easily connected to protein-protein interactions to establish and analyse networks responsible for multi-pharmacology. This network-based approach can provide a starting point for drug-repositioning. PROMISCUOUS is publicly available at http://bioinformatics.charite.de/promiscuous.