All interactions have a ‘subject’ drug and an ‘affected’ drug, allowing for a notion of causality within interactions. Each interaction also has a ‘type,’ which succinctly captures the nature of the interaction; there are 12 types of interactions within DrugBank (https://dev.drugbank.com/guides/drug_interactions/parameters). Of these, all types with the exception of ‘increase risk of hypersensitivity’ can either be associated with ‘increase’ or ‘decrease.’ This captures whether the subject drug increases or decreases the relevant property of the affected drug. Additional types, including ‘change dynamics,’ ‘change specific active metabolite,’ ‘change specific adverse effects,’ and ‘change specific effects’ also allow related entities to be specified such as a metabolite or adverse effect. These interaction types are present as separate entries, but also appear in a standardized ‘summary’ string describing the interaction.
