NIH Creates Database Of Approved Drugs

The NIH Chemical Genomics Center (NCGC) has built a comprehensive collection of clinically approved small-molecule drugs that could help jump-start development of treatments for rare and neglected diseases. The NCGC Pharmaceutical Collection (NPC) was created as both a publicly available electronic database and a screening resource. The database, which is described in the April 27 issue of Science Translational Medicine (DOI: 10.1126/scitranslmed.3001862), can be downloaded at tripod.nih.gov/npc. It includes information on 2,750 small-molecule drugs that have been approved for use in the U.S., Canada, Europe, and Japan, as well as data on drugs that are currently being investigated in clinical trials. NCGC hopes to eventually provide information on more than 7,500 drugs that have been tested in humans. So far, NCGC has collected physical samples of 2,400 of the approved drugs, which are provided to researchers through NIH’s Therapeutics for Rare & Neglected Diseases program and the Tox21 initiative, a multiagency effort to use high-throughput screening tools in toxicity testing.