In the modern world of medicine the number of drugs (by which we mean medications) has skyrocketed as has the number of brand names and uses for the medications. It has been an explosion of information that has been reflected in print journals, professional and popular books and websites.
For people with serious illnesses and for the general public some knowledge of medications available or drugs they are using is a very necessary need. Physicians are busy and have been know to make mistakes or merely to forget that a drug has a conflict with another. Pharmacies in the First World have computers that are supposed to check your prescription for any conflicts. It is your life. If you want to trust the drug store computer, go right ahead.
A more efficient idea is to stay abreast of current research and to know exactly what you are putting in your body. It could be life or death.
There are a number of popular medication guides listed below this post and, undoubtedly more. There are books for both prescription and over-the-counter drugs. They stick to the uses of the drug and a synopsis in lay language as to how it works. Then there are sections on dosage, side effects and serious conflicts, the size and quantities in which it is sold, brand and generic names as well as instructions in case of over-dosage. These are valuable books to have in the house. Often they are available in reasonably priced paperbacks from reputable publishers.
There are also the professional books, notably PDR, The Physicians’ Desk Reference. These are huge compilations of everything that is on the market, updated annually, with pictures of the medication (they are, you knew, color coded), scientific descriptions with molecular diagrams as well as dosage, indications, contra-indications, etc. These are large and expensive and useful if you are a professional or really need a lot of information.
Now there are also helpful websites like The Mayo Clinic and those of various hospitals and link sites that include information from drug databases.
Finally we get to the subject of this post. The University of Alberta, Canada recently opened the world’s largest
drug database on the internet.
Dr. David Wishart, from the departments of Computing Science and Biological Sciences and the Faculty of Pharmaceutical Sciences, first began working on an online, interactive database as a teaching tool to help his pharmacy students learn more about the molecular details of different drugs. Wanting to develop one source that offers a broad scope of information, Wishart and his team created DrugBank, the world’s largest and most complete resource on drugs and drug targets. DrugBank contains detailed chemical, pharmaceutical, medical and molecular biological information on more than 3000 drug targets and 4100 approved or experimental drugs products.
This site which was originally for pharmacy students and researchers is very complete and has something for everyone. It is accessible to the general public and is also highly useful to the entire community of medical professionals. It is said to be the “first database …(to bring)…
… the latest data from the Human Genome Project together with detailed chemical information about drugs and drug products,” said Wishart. The diversity of the data types combined with the fact that the data were mostly paper-bound made the assembly of DrugBank both difficult and time-consuming. More than a dozen textbooks, several hundred journal articles, nearly 30 different electronic databases and at least 20 in-house or web-based programs were individually searched, accessed, compared, written or run over the course of four years.
It is also involved in the Human Metabolome Project which is to map the “metabolites in bodily fluids”.
(The research is published in the Jan. 1, 2006 edition of the journal Nucleic Acids Research and has been supported by Genome Alberta, through the Genome Canada project: Building the Metabolomics Toolbox.) This post was based on an original report by Phoebe Dey U. of Alberta.
