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NCATS Creates Drug Development Data Portal

Damien Duveau writes on a board

Research scientist Damien Duveau, Ph.D., works on a chemical formula in the NCATS chemistry laboratory. (Daniel Soñé Photography)

Drug development scientists frequently need to use a variety of data sources for their research, but information is not always complete and is rarely, if ever, in one place. Searching for and verifying the accuracy of data wastes valuable time.

To help researchers find the information they need more easily, NCATS created a new online tool — NCATS Inxight: Drugs — that aggregates reliable, curated drug development data from multiple existing sources, all in one place. This open-access, easy-to-use and evolving online portal is designed to help researchers obtain the data needed to repurpose or advance drugs to address unmet medical needs by:

  • Listing — as accurately as possible — all U.S.-approved prescription and over-the-counter drugs, U.S.-withdrawn drugs, drugs marketed globally, and investigational interventions.
  • Supplying manually curated, referenced data on the method of action, targets and uses (approved and off-label) for nearly 10,000 drug substances.
  • Providing the context of medical use, including names, synonyms, molecular targets, pharmacology, diseases and conditions, and marketed products containing the drug.

Unlike other drug development databases, NCATS Inxight: Drugs offers a substantial amount of manually curated data from multiple independent, public sources. These include updated information from the NCATS Pharmaceutical Collection as well as data published from the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) for the first time. The FDA’s Substance Registration System, which supplies more than 100,000 data points in NCATS Inxight: Drugs, is built on software developed at NCATS through the collaborative ginas project.

NCATS Inxight: Drugs is the only resource that:

  • Uses a complete list of rigorously defined drug substances as its core dataset. Substances are defined according to the ISO 11238 standard and richly annotated with data from a variety of publicly available resources.
  • Includes all types of pharmaceutical ingredients found in drug products: small molecule agents, antibodies, oligonucleotides and natural product extracts.
  • Features, for each record, a rigorous scientific definition that complies with regulatory standards for substance identification.

The NCATS Inxight: Drugs resource, which is updated regularly, uses novel algorithms developed at NCATS to enable automated data aggregation from nearly unlimited sources.

Posted August 2018

Last updated on August 22, 2023