NAV

Release Notes

Feature Release 19.09

Release Date: September 16, 2019

Simple & Clinical Descriptions

We've added new simple and clinical descriptions to our drug data. Provide your end-users clear and concise descriptions as a part of lookups or listings of medicinal ingredients.

  • The simple description uses non-technical language and summarizes the most common uses for the drug.
  • The clinical description includes the key details about indications and mechanism to quickly summarize the drug for a professional user.
Read the descriptions documentation for more details:
CSVXMLJSON

Supplemental Ingredients

Supplemental ingredients is a new feature that makes it clear which active ingredients are related to the main indication of a product. For example there are products which may include alcohol as a supernatant. Previously alcohol was labelled as an active ingredient since this is how the FDA labels it in this case, but we have moved it over to the supplemental ingredients field to clarify that it is not part of the main indication.

  • In the CSV, supplemental ingredients are indicated by the boolean clinically_relevant column in the ingredients table.
  • In the API, XML, and JSON, supplemental ingredients are listed in the optional and separate supplemental_ingredients field wherever ingredients are found.
Read the ingredients documentation for more details:
APICSVXMLJSON

Product Filters & Standings

When searching for products, it can be helpful to filter out certain types of products. Product filters allow you to easily filter out cosmetics, products used for allergenic testing, kits, and more. Product standings provide a simple way to understand the quality of information available about a product. Most products are in “good” standing - the available information is consistent and the data in DrugBank can be used with confidence. Labelling and regulatory information for some products offer conflicting information, such as differing ingredients, and these are marked as discordant. Finally, some products are marked as deprecated, meaning they no longer have a drug label.

The following fields have been added to products in all data formats:

  • standing
  • standing_updated_on
  • standing_reason
  • jurisdiction_marketing_category
  • branded
  • prescription
  • unapproved
  • vaccine
  • allergenic
  • cosmetic
  • kit
  • solo
  • available
Read the products documentation for more details:
CSVXMLJSON

XML Improvements

  • Per-drug files: XML exports are now available in per-drug files. In this format, each exported drug is provided in its own XML file. With smaller XML files, this format is much less memory-intensive to import and analyse. Please let us know if you would like your XML export in this format.

CSV / SQL Improvements

  • New table: indication_product_concepts. This table links indications to product concepts. The table is similar to that of indication_drugs or indication_categories. Each product concept is linked as either indicated or combination.
  • New columns: The polypeptides table will be extended with additional columns to bring the CSV format into alignment with JSON/XML. The new columns are:
    • name
    • uniprot_name
    • organism_id
    • gene_name
    • molecular_weight
    • theoretical_pi
    • general_function
    • specific_function
    • signal_regions
    • transmembrane_regions
    • genbank_gene_id
    • genecard_id
    • locus
    • genatlas_id
    • hgnc_id
    • meta_cyc_id
    • ncbi_sequence_ids
    • tissue_specificity
    • cofactor
    • subunit
    • cellular_location
  • New columns: The product_concepts table will be extended with an additional column: strength_key. This column is very similar to the existing ingredient_key and exact_ingredient_key columns. It allows for filtering product concepts by whether or not they have strength information in components, and by whether the exact ingredients and strengths are equivalent between two product concepts.
  • Easier condition queries. The conditions table will be extended with a new column: preferred_term_id. This column duplicates the information in the condition_synonyms table, which will be considered deprecated after this change. The condition_synonyms table will be removed at a later date.
  • In addition, all tables which join with conditions (such as the indication_conditions table) will now always link to the preferred term for a group of condition synonyms. Together, these two changes can greatly simplify certain queries, making them easier to design and faster to execute.
  • Finally, condition accession numbers will be added to the accession_numbers table. This change will bring the conditions into line with other models which also use accession numbers, and provides support for conditions with multiple accession numbers, which occasionally occurs when a condition has been directly merged with a duplicate.