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. 2015 Jan;43(Database issue):D907-13.
doi: 10.1093/nar/gku1066. Epub 2014 Oct 31.

ADReCS: an ontology database for aiding standardization and hierarchical classification of adverse drug reaction terms

Mei-Chun Cai  1 , Quan Xu  1 , Yan-Jing Pan  2 , Wen Pan  1 , Nan Ji  3 , Yin-Bo Li  1 , Hai-Jing Jin  1 , Ke Liu  1 , Zhi-Liang Ji  4
Affiliations

ADReCS: an ontology database for aiding standardization and hierarchical classification of adverse drug reaction terms

Mei-Chun Cai et al. Nucleic Acids Res. 2015 Jan.

Abstract

Adverse drug reactions (ADRs) are noxious and unexpected effects during normal drug therapy. They have caused significant clinical burden and been responsible for a large portion of new drug development failure. Molecular understanding and in silico evaluation of drug (or candidate) safety in laboratory is thus so desired, and unfortunately has been largely hindered by misuse of ADR terms. The growing impact of bioinformatics and systems biology in toxicological research also requires a specialized ADR term system that works beyond a simple glossary. Adverse Drug Reaction Classification System (ADReCS; http://bioinf.xmu.edu.cn/ADReCS) is a comprehensive ADR ontology database that provides not only ADR standardization but also hierarchical classification of ADR terms. The ADR terms were pre-assigned with unique digital IDs and at the same time were well organized into a four-level ADR hierarchy tree for building an ADR-ADR relation. Currently, the database covers 6544 standard ADR terms and 34,796 synonyms. It also incorporates information of 1355 single active ingredient drugs and 134,022 drug-ADR pairs. In summary, ADReCS offers an opportunity for direct computation on ADR terms and also provides clues to mining common features underlying ADRs.

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Figures

Figure 1.
Figure 1.
Hierarchy and digital IDs of ADReCS, using the ADR term ‘Urticaria’ as an example.
Figure 2.
Figure 2.
Schematic view of ADRs/drugs search and navigation supported in ADReCS: (A) ADR search, (B) Drug search, (C) Browse by ADRs or drugs and (D) Tools for structure search.
Figure 3.
Figure 3.
Statistics of ADReCS. (A) The number of ADRs counted by drug with frequency thresholds of 1%–5% (red, 717 drugs), above 5% (green, 344 drugs) and all (blue, 1355 drugs), respectively. (B) The number of drugs counted by ADR with frequency thresholds of 1%–5% (red, 1842 ADRs), above 5% (green, 1250 ADRs) and all (blue, 4545 ADRs), respectively. (C) Statistics of drug–ADR pairs by ADR frequency. (D) Statistics of drug–ADR pairs by ADR frequency group. The drug–ADR pairs were classified into three groups: Rare (frequency thresholds of <0.1%), Infrequent (frequency thresholds of 0.1%–1%) and Frequent (frequency thresholds of >1%).
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