Wikipedia
The DrugBank database is a comprehensive, freely accessible, online database containing information on drugs and drug targets. As both a bioinformatics and a cheminformatics resource, DrugBank combines detailed drug (i.e. chemical, pharmacological and pharmaceutical) data with comprehensive drug target (i.e. sequence, structure, and pathway) information. Because of its broad scope, comprehensive referencing and unusually detailed data descriptions, DrugBank is more akin to a drug encyclopedia than a drug database. As a result, links to DrugBank are maintained for nearly all drugs listed in Wikipedia. DrugBank is widely used by the drug industry, medicinal chemists, pharmacists, physicians, students and the general public. Its extensive drug and drug-target data has enabled the discovery and repurposing of a number of existing drugs to treat rare and newly identified illnesses.
The latest release of the database (version 4.0) contains 7677 drug entries including 1558 FDA-approved small molecule drugs, 155 FDA-approved biotech ( protein/ peptide) drugs, 87 nutraceuticals and over 6000 experimental drugs. Additionally, 4270 non-redundant protein (i.e. drug target/ enzyme/transporter/carrier) sequences are linked to these drug entries. Each DrugCard (Fig. 1) entry contains more than 200 data fields with half of the information being devoted to drug/chemical data and the other half devoted to drug target or protein data.
Four additional databases, HMDB, T3DB, SMPDB and FooDB are also part of a general suite of metabolomic/ cheminformatic databases. HMDB contains equivalent information on more than 40,000 human metabolites, T3DB contains information on 3100 common toxins and environmental pollutants, SMPDB contains pathway diagrams for nearly 700 human metabolic pathways and disease pathways, while FooDB contains equivalent information on ~28,000 food components and food additives.