PLoS ONE (Jan 2015)

PharmDB-K: Integrated Bio-Pharmacological Network Database for Traditional Korean Medicine.

  • Ji-Hyun Lee,
  • Kyoung Mii Park,
  • Dong-Jin Han,
  • Nam Young Bang,
  • Do-Hee Kim,
  • Hyeongjin Na,
  • Semi Lim,
  • Tae Bum Kim,
  • Dae Gyu Kim,
  • Hyun-Jung Kim,
  • Yeonseok Chung,
  • Sang Hyun Sung,
  • Young-Joon Surh,
  • Sunghoon Kim,
  • Byung Woo Han

DOI
https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0142624
Journal volume & issue
Vol. 10, no. 11
p. e0142624

Abstract

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Despite the growing attention given to Traditional Medicine (TM) worldwide, there is no well-known, 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. Database URL: http://pharmdb-k.org, http://biomart.i-pharm.org.