It is because of these emerging trends in drug informatics that we established DrugBank in 2006 (6). DrugBank was originally designed to be a comprehensive, up-to-date, freely available web resource containing detailed drug, drug–target, drug mechanism of action and drug interaction information for both approved and experimental drugs. By making this rich, high quality, primary-sourced content freely available, we hoped it would make the discovery of new drugs, the repurposing of old drugs, the understanding of drug mechanisms and the tracking of drug interactions easier for academics, medicinal chemists, pharmacists and pharmaceutical companies. This concept appears to have been very appealing and as a result, DrugBank has become one of the world's most widely used reference drug resources, receiving >30 million web accesses each year and averaging >5000 citations/year.
