DIA-DB: A web-accessible database for the prediction of diabetes drugs

Abstract

Diabetes mellitus is the 8th leading cause of death worldwide, with 1.5million deaths in 2012, andmedical costs that reached 245$ billion in the US. Moreover, it is estimated that roughly 387 million people worldwide suffer from diabetes mellitus, with numbers growing rapidly. These facts demonstrate the importance of creating a completely new and innovative method for the fast development of novel anti-diabetic compounds. In silico prediction methods represent an efficient approach for the prediction of diabetes drugs, aiming to explaining preclinical drug development and therefore enabling the reduction of associated time, costs and experiments. We present hereDIA-DB, aweb server for the prediction of diabetes drugs that uses two different approaches; a) comparison by similarity with a curated database of anti-diabetic drugs and experimental compounds, and b) inverse virtual screening of the input molecules chosen by the users against a set of protein targets identified as key elements in diabetes. The server is open to all users and is accessible at http://bio-hpc.eu/dia-db, where registration is not necessary, and a detailed report with the prediction results are sent to the user by email once calculations are finished. This is the first public domain database for diabetes drugs.