The new release of the IUPHAR Guide to Pharmacology was made on 2nd September 2021 – this is version 2021.3. This blog post gives details of the key content updates and website changes.
The 2021.3 release contains:
- 1,596 human targets with curated quantitative ligand interactions.
- 11,025 ligands, 8,161 of which have curated quantitative target interactions.
- 1,688 approved drugs, 1,018 with curated quantitative interactions.
- Clinical use summaries for over 3,005 ligands of which 1,684 are approved drugs.
Coronavirus
The Guide to Pharmacology coronavirus information page continues to be updated on a regular basis to capture the latest pharmacological strategies under investigation to mitigate against COVID-19.
Most recently we have added the DX600 experimental peptide, which has been shown to prevent pseudotyped SARS-CoV-2 from entering heart cells (Williams et al., Commun. Biol, 2021). Also added are two monoclonal antibody cocktails. The first, AZD7442, is a combination of cilgavimab and tixagevimab, which reach phase 3 clinical evalutaion, and is proposed to have therapeutic potential in treating individuals who respond poorly to vaccination. The second, Ronapreve, is a combination of imdevimab and casirivimab, aimed at blocking SARS-CoV-2 entry into cells it was approved by the UK’s MHRA in August 2021 having previous been approved by both the FDA and Japanese Ministry of Health.
Curation Updates
Since our 2021.2 update we have added over ~120 new ligands. These have all been manually curated with chemical or peptide structures, links to external resources, general comments, notes on clinical development where appropriate, and target interaction data where this is available.
We have also made updates to over 170 existing ligand comments and 102 bioactivity comments. An additional 8 existing ligand have now been tagged as approved drugs, bringing the total approved drugs in GtoPdb to 1,688.
Website Updates
- We have extended the database to be able to curate and display HELM notation for peptides. Currently this has been added to over 60 peptides, with more planned in future releases.
- New, antibacterial ligand category, https://www.guidetopharmacology.org/GRAC/LigandListForward?type=AntiBac&database=all
Guide to Malaria Pharmacology (GtoMPdb)
These are the recent advancements made in the GtoMPdb for this database release:
- The Antimalarial targets family and the Antimalarial ligands family have been updated, giving a total of 39 P. falciparum (3D7) targets and 114 ligands tagged as antimalarial in the database.
- The Plasmodium target Plasmodium falciparum histone acetyltransferase GCN5 was added during this release.
- Work has continued on the process of adding subfamilies to the Antimalarial targets family.
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[…] our 2021.3 update we have added over ~110 new ligands. These have all been manually curated with chemical or peptide […]