PharmDB-K: Integrated bio-pharmacological network database for traditional Korean medicine

Abstract

Despite the growing attention given to Traditional Medicine (TM) worldwide, there is no wellknown, publicly available, integrated bio-pharmacological Traditional Korean Medicine (TKM) database for researchers in drug discovery. In this study, we have constructed PharmDB-K, which offers comprehensive information relating to TKM-Associated drugs (compound), disease indication, and protein relationships. To explore the underlying molecular interaction of TKM, we integrated fourteen different databases, six Pharmacopoeias, and literature, and established a massive bio-pharmacological network for TKM and experimentally validated some cases predicted from the PharmDB-K analyses. Currently, PharmDB-K contains information about 262 TKMs, 7,815 drugs, 3,721 diseases, 32,373 proteins, and 1,887 side effects. One of the unique sets of information in PharmDB-K includes 400 indicator compounds used for standardization of herbal medicine. Furthermore, we are operating PharmDB-K via phExplorer (a network visualization software) and BioMart (a data federation framework) for convenient search and analysis of the TKM network.