Comprehensive pathway generation of drug action and drug metabolism for DrugBank

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DrugBank is a comprehensive, freely available web resource containing detailed drug action and metabolism information for ~3000 medically approved drugs. It is accessed by 1000s of scientists and millions of students, teachers, pharmacists and consumers each year. It is widely used both as a teaching tool and a drug discovery platform. To make DrugBank more appealing to a wider audience, we have started generating detailed diagrams (pathways) illustrating how different drugs work and how they are metabolized in the body. These pathways depict complex molecular processes using colourful, carefully designed molecular maps filled with scientifically accurate details. To date we have drawn and annotated nearly 450 drug action and drug metabolism pathways. Our goal for this project is to illustrate another 2500 pathways so that nearly every drug in DrugBank has a pathway. Generating a single drug pathway requires hours of extensive literature research by knowledgeable individuals with training in medicinal chemistry, pharmacy and/or biochemistry. It also requires many hours of skillful, strictly standardized illustration by pathway artists. The pathways are generated using a specially developed program called PathWhiz that allows pathways to be drawn directly on the computer and saved in a computer-readable format. When this project is complete, DrugBank will have the world's largest collection of drug action and drug metabolism pathways. These pathways will be made publicly available and will provide a superb resource for Canadian students, teachers, pharmacists, consumers or anyone wanting to know more about drugs and drug action. More importantly, by creating thousands of computer-readable pathways, this project will allow data scientists to systematically mine, compare, extract and interpret the information in DrugBank's pathways. This will lead to a fundamentally better understanding of drug action and could potentially inspire the development of new drugs. Indeed, the creation and use of pathway databases in both biochemistry and genetics has revolutionized both fields. We believe the creation of a drug pathway database could do the same for the Canadian drug industry.