DDInter: an online drug-drug interaction database towards improving clinical decision-making and patient safety

Abstract

Drug-drug interaction (DDI) can trigger many adverse effects in patients and has emerged as a threat to medicine and public health. Despite the continuous information accumulation of clinically significant DDIs, there are few open-access knowledge systems dedicated to the curation of DDI associations. To facilitate the clinicians to screen for dangerous drug combinations and improve health systems, we present DDInter, a curated DDI database with comprehensive data, practical medication guidance, intuitive function interface, and powerful visualization to the scientific community. Currently, DDInter contains about 0.24M DDI associations connecting 1833 approved drugs (1972 entities). Each drug is annotated with basic chemical and pharmacological information and its interaction network. For DDI associations, abundant and professional annotations are provided, including severity, mechanism description, strategies for managing potential side effects, alternative medications, etc. The drug entities and interaction entities are efficiently cross-linked. In addition to basic query and browsing, the prescription checking function is developed to facilitate clinicians to decide whether drugs combinations can be used safely. It can also be used for informatics-based DDI investigation and evaluation of other prediction frameworks. We hope that DDInter will prove useful in improving clinical decision-making and patient safety. DDInter is freely available, without registration, at http://ddinter.scbdd.com/.

Graphical Abstract

DDInter provides detailed annotations of each DDI association and enables users to conduct data query, data retrieval and prescription checking.

Figure 1.

The statistics of the DDI associations in DDInter based on mechanisms (A) and risk levels (B). Associations with unavailable or incomplete description of interaction details were labeled as ‘Unknown’.

Figure 2.

The web interface of DDInter. (A) Basic chemical and pharmacological information of the queried drug (caffeine, DDInter263). (B) Visualization of DDI network. The relation graph displays the distributions of all the involved DDIs and the sunburst chart shows different hierarchies of DDI associations. (C) A list of drugs interacting with the query drug. (D) The page of specific drug–drug pair shows extensive information of interactions. (E) The interaction checker module helps physicians screen for risks in prescriptions.