The DrugAge database of aging-related drugs

Abstract

Aging is a major worldwide medical challenge. Not surprisingly, identifying drugs and compounds that extend lifespan in model organisms is a growing research area. Here, we present DrugAge (http://genomics.senescence.info/drugs/), a curated database of lifespan-extending drugs and compounds. At the time of writing, DrugAge contains 1316 entries featuring 418 different compounds from studies across 27 model organisms, including worms, flies, yeast and mice. Data were manually curated from 324 publications. Using drug-gene interaction data, we also performed a functional enrichment analysis of targets of lifespan-extending drugs. Enriched terms include various functional categories related to glutathione and antioxidant activity, ion transport and metabolic processes. In addition, we found a modest but significant overlap between targets of lifespan-extending drugs and known aging-related genes, suggesting that some but not most aging-related pathways have been targeted pharmacologically in longevity studies. DrugAge is freely available online for the scientific community and will be an important resource for biogerontologists.

Keywords: bioinformatics; compound; functional genomics; lifespan; longevity; pharmacology.

Figure 1

Several snapshots of DrugAge's Web interface. (A) Snapshot of the DrugAge browser, accompanied by Web interface examples showing (B) the distribution of drug lifespan effects in C. elegans; (C) average lifespan results for the drug ‘indolepropionamide’; and (D) an overall species summary breakdown across the database.

Figure 2

(A) Violin plot based on the average/median lifespan changes reported on 653 C. elegans, 357 D. melanogaster, 63 M. musculus and 23 R. norvegicus lifespan assays. (B) Top functional annotation clusters of gene targets of compounds in DrugAge. Only clusters with an enrichment score >4 are shown. Full results in Table S1.