In addition to interactions with other drugs, drug–food interactions represent an important data type for both patients and HCPs alike. The number of drug–food interactions has grown from 1195 in DrugBank 5.0 to 2475 in DrugBank 6.0. This was due to a focused review conducted in 2020 and ongoing efforts by the curation team to capture these data. Similar to drug–drug interactions, drug–food interactions in DrugBank possess an interaction type, of which there are 68. The most common types (accounting for 66% of all interactions) are ‘take with or without food’, ‘avoid alcohol’, ‘take with food’, ‘avoid St. John's Wort’, ‘avoid grapefruit products’ and ‘take on an empty stomach’. These interaction types form the basis for the interaction description, which can also be augmented by additional information, when available. Both types of drug–drug and drug–food interactions come primarily from prescribing information, but are also extracted from peer reviewed articles, clinical guidelines and other reputable sources. New interactions are added based on updates to existing drug labels, as monitored by the curation team.
