Fei Wang

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.

Drug repurposing or repositioning is a technique whereby existing drugs are used to treat emerging and challenging diseases, including COVID-19. Drug repurposing has become a promising approach because of the opportunity for reduced development timelines and overall costs. In the big data era, artificial intelligence (AI) and network medicine offer cutting-edge application of information science to defining disease, medicine, therapeutics, and identifying targets with the least error. In this Review, we introduce guidelines on how to use AI for accelerating drug repurposing or repositioning, for which AI approaches are not just formidable but are also necessary. We discuss how to use AI models in precision medicine, and as an example, how AI models can accelerate COVID-19 drug repurposing. Rapidly developing, powerful, and innovative AI and network medicine technologies can expedite therapeutic development. This Review provides a strong rationale for using AI-based assistive tools for drug repurposing medications for human disease, including during the COVID-19 pandemic.

Despite the fact that deep learning has achieved remarkable success in various domains over the past decade, its application in molecular informatics and drug discovery is still limited. Recent advances in adapting deep architectures to structured data have opened a new paradigm for pharmaceutical research. In this survey, we provide a systematic review on the emerging field of graph convolutional networks and their applications in drug discovery and molecular informatics. Typically we are interested in why and how graph convolution networks can help in drug-related tasks. We elaborate the existing applications through four perspectives: molecular property and activity prediction, interaction prediction, synthesis prediction and de novo drug design. We briefly introduce the theoretical foundations behind graph convolutional networks and illustrate various architectures based on different formulations. Then we summarize the representative applications in drug-related problems. We also discuss the current challenges and future possibilities of applying graph convolutional networks to drug discovery.

Recent advances and accomplishments of artificial intelligence (AI) and deep generative models have established their usefulness in medicinal applications, especially in drug discovery and development. To correctly apply AI, the developer and user face questions such as which protocols to consider, which factors to scrutinize, and how the deep generative models can integrate the relevant disciplines. This review summarizes classical and newly developed AI approaches, providing an updated and accessible guide to the broad computational drug discovery and development community. We introduce deep generative models from different standpoints and describe the theoretical frameworks for representing chemical and biological structures and their applications. We discuss the data and technical challenges and highlight future directions of multimodal deep generative models for accelerating drug discovery.

Drug-drug interaction (DDI) is an important topic for public health, and thus attracts attention from both academia and industry. Here we hypothesize that clinical side effects (SEs) provide a human phenotypic profile and can be translated into the development of computational models for predicting adverse DDIs. We propose an integrative label propagation framework to predict DDIs by integrating SEs extracted from package inserts of prescription drugs, SEs extracted from FDA Adverse Event Reporting System, and chemical structures from PubChem. Experimental results based on hold-out validation demonstrated the effectiveness of the proposed algorithm. In addition, the new algorithm also ranked drug information sources based on their contributions to the prediction, thus not only confirming that SEs are important features for DDI prediction but also paving the way for building more reliable DDI prediction models by prioritizing multiple data sources. By applying the proposed algorithm to 1,626 small-molecule drugs which have one or more SE profiles, we obtained 145,068 predicted DDIs. The predicted DDIs will help clinicians to avoid hazardous drug interactions in their prescriptions and will aid pharmaceutical companies to design large-scale clinical trial by assessing potentially hazardous drug combinations. All data sets and predicted DDIs are available at http://astro.temple.edu/~tua87106/ddi.html.