>>Home
BCTD: Bioactive Compound Target Database
Discovering and developing new drug is an arduous, costly and risky process. From discovering a new drug to
launching it to the market always needs more than 10 years and 800 million on the average. During the long
period, only a few drug-like compounds can be approved to be really drugs what are effective and safe, while
most failed in pre-clinical or clinical trial even was withdrawn from the market because of risks to the
patients. Drug repositioning, which is discovering new indications of old drugs out of their original indications,
is a time-saving and cost-efficient manner free from considering the safety and utility. In recent years, drug
repositioning have drawn more and more attentions of pharmaceutical enterprises and academic institutions.
In drug discovery, there is no doubt that information about drug-target relations is very crucial. We want to find
some clues of drug repositioning by combining the targets with information hiding in the gene-expression profiles.
It appears that dozens of databases including information of drugs and targets were constructed with varying scope
by different research groups in the past decade. Therapeutic Target Database (TTD) is a target database mainly
embodying 388 successful targets and 461 clinical trial targets of drugs. DrugBank is a comprehensive data warehouse
covering aspects of drugs (i.e., chemical, pharmacological, and pharmaceutical) where containing 1602 FDA-approved mall molecule drugs, certainly including the
information of targets. KEGG also is a comprehensive database resource for understanding high-level functions and
utilities of the biological system from molecular-level information, including some targets of drugs/compounds with
verified pharmacological action. PROMISCUOUS integrates drugs, targets and side-effects together to establish an
approach of drug-repositioning. However when we search for the targets of those compounds aforementioned, the return
display diversely in different databases or no results. Because the content of different databases come from diverse
origins and have different coverage. And databases should upgrade timely while some previous knowledge being proved
to be inaccurate and new findings emerging in endlessly with the development of science.
Therefore, we construct Bioactive Compound Target Database (BCTD) as a concise drug-target relations database based on the aforementioned
bioactive compounds without querying and validating drug-target interactions from multiple public databases and
scientific literatures. This database provides a platform not only for us, but also for researchers and educators
from varying disciplines and backgrounds (pharmaceutical, clinical, non-clinical, academic) to have a better
recognition of drug-target relations.