Pharmascope

Visually exploring the Pharmacopoeia

This tool allows the user to visually explore all of the FDA approved drugs. This is done by clicking through categories, down from the hierarchy of general fields like small molecules versus biologics all. Left-click will cause the user to go down in the hierarchy, while right clicking brings it back up.


The sizes of the treemap boxes indicate how many FDA approved drugs there are in that category. When the bottom of a category is reached, all of the drugs are displayed, and the user can choose which one to learn more about. As you can see, a very subtle color scheme was used to heighten the contrast between boxes.


Then, an informative window pops up where indications and pharmacological mechanisms are revealed. This is particularly interesting to patients who are taking medicine or students who are learning about them because they can see a drug together with all of the other drugs of a particular class, allowing them to compare and contrast.

Some conclusions
There are a few very interesting conclusions. First, it is amazing to see how many more small molecule drugs there are when compared to biolgics or nutraceutical treatments. This is reflective of how modern biologics are--before the age of detailed understanding of molecular biology, it was very difficult to develop biologic drugs. Within small molecules, there are some very interesting conclusions as well. For example, the number of cancer drugs is very low, although to many this seems like very highly marketed drugs that are well known. Perhaps this has to do with the dire nature of cancer, and marketing. It is also evident from this how few antiparasitic drugs there are... since these drugs target mostly people in poor countries, there has not been as much of an incentive to develop these, especially since they are difficult and expensive drug targets. I was also surprised that among small molecules, drugs targeting the nervous system were the most popular. This probably has to do with how pervasive they are in our culture--we can buy painkillers practically anywhere nowadays.

Additional information-

Sourcecode is available here: project.pde, WordItem.pde, WordMap.pde

This would not be possible without DrugBank. DrugBank: a knowledgebase for drugs, drug actions and drug targets. Wishart DS, Knox C, Guo AC, Cheng D, Shrivastava S, Tzur D, Gautam B, Hassanali M. Nucleic Acids Res. 2008 Jan;36(Database issue):D901-6. PMID: 18048412

DrugBank: a comprehensive resource for in silico drug discovery and exploration. Wishart DS, Knox C, Guo AC, Shrivastava S, Hassanali M, Stothard P, Chang Z, Woolsey J. Nucleic Acids Res. 2006 Jan 1;34(Database issue):D668-72. PMID: 16381955