Database Release 2025.3

Version 2025.3 of the IUPHAR/BPS Guide to Pharmacology database was released on 10th September 2025, our second release of the year. This blog post gives details of the key content updates and website changes. GtoPdb now contains:

• 3,112 human targets, 1,790 of which have curated quantitative ligand interactions.
• 13,503 ligands, 9,758 of which have curated quantitative target interactions.
• 2,139 approved drugs, 1,201 with curated quantitative interactions.
• Clinical use summaries for 4,133 ligands.
• 24,207 curated interaction, 21,968 which are quantitative.
• Data curated from over 48,492 references

In this release, 246 new ligands, 392 new curated interactions have been added.

Commercial Access to GtoPdb

As a reminder to all our users, the Guide to Pharmacology has always been an open-access, freely available resource. Our expert-curated database of pharmacological data has been maintained over the past 10-15 years on ever changing and sadly, diminishing financial resources. We really want to keep GtoPdb open-access for all, but maintaining and updating the database is not free. Unfortunately the current funding landscape threatens our ability to ensure the Guide to Pharmacology’s sustainability going forward.

We have therefore taking steps to ask for commercial organisations, that use GtoPdb, to contribute financially to support its future maintenance, curation and sustainability.

More information can be found on our website: GtoPdb – Financial Sustainability Support

Curation Update

The principal curation effort since our last release has focussed on collaborating with our extensive network of experts who contribute to refreshing the information and data that are collated for inclusion in the 2025/26 edition of the Concise Guide to PHARMACOLOGY. This curation also included addition of a number of new ligand entries.

We also continue curating approved drugs, which now total 38 for 2025, across the approval agencies that we are able to easily follow- list available here https://www.guidetopharmacology.org/GRAC/DrugApprovalsForward.

Other ligands curated include some from the First Disclosures session at the ACS Fall 2025 meeting – via Drug Hunter- with additional information curated by our team. So far we have been able to curate 10/12 of these novel compounds. The other two can’t be curated at the moment due to lack of supporting evidence and quantitative interaction data.

Approved Drugs

We have curated 21 new drugs that have been granted approval for clinical use in 2025.  These can now be easily viewed here https://www.guidetopharmacology.org/GRAC/DrugApprovalsForward. This set includes drugs approved by the FDA (14 in total) and by other national approval agencies. Only the most recent FDA approval (clesrovimab) has not been curated as it targets the RSV fusion protein which is not included in the GtoPdb.

*curated, but not in time for this release. They will be available following the next release in December.

Antibacterial Curation

Our collaboration with Antibiotic DB (ADB; www.antibioticdb.com) continues to allow us to extend the coverage of ligands with annotated antibacterial activity in GtoPdb and provide comprehensive chemistry and pharmacology for select antibacterials curated within ADB, via reciprocal links. This project is supported by the Global Antibiotic Research and Development Partnership (GARDP; https://gardp.org/).

Currently we have 688 ligands tagged in GtoPdb as ‘antibacterial’ and 665 of these have links to compounds at ADB. 271 are approved drugs. Since our last release we have added 18 new antibacterial ligands.

Website Updates

Drug Approvals summary page

Earlier this year we made public a new page that records details of drug approvals. https://www.guidetopharmacology.org/GRAC/DrugApprovalsForward

Each year, the Guide to Pharmacology Curation Team puts together a list of the latest approved drugs from FDA, EMA and MHRA as well as first-time approvals from other agencies. The new drug approval page, shows these approved drugs in table, organised by year of approval.

We have now added a tab for 2025, so can record new drug approvals as we identify and curate them. Drugs will be curated in the database are hyperlinked to their respective summary pages from the INN in the table. There are some cases were we have listed an approved drug but it doesn’t have a link because it will not have been curated.

Antibacterial landing page

IUPHAR/BPS Guide to Pharmacology (GtoPdb) collaborates with AntibioticDB (ADB; www.antibioticdb.com), an open-access database of antibacterial agents. The maintenance and further development of ADB has been supported by the Global Antibiotic Research and Development Partnership (GARDP; https://gardp.org/) since 2022. ADB was set up to serve as a reference and a source of starting points for future research and (re-)development of antibacterial therapeutics [1] . This collaboration has provided expert-driven oversight to increase the coverage of antibacterial compounds in GtoPdb.

As part of our work in curating antibacterial compounds in GtoPdb we now have a dedicated landing page for antibacterials. This page provides information on our collaboration with AntibioticDB and gives information about our inclusion criteria for curating antibacterials. The pages consolidates information on antibacterials in GtoPdb and has a full table of all the antibacterial curated in the database, with hyperlinks to the specific ligand summary pages for each compound.

1. Bertagnolio S, Dobreva Z, Centner CM, Olaru ID, Donà D, Burzo S, Huttner BD, Chaillon A, Gebreselassie N, Wi T, Hasso-Agopsowicz M et al.. WHO global research priorities for antimicrobial resistance in human health. Lancet Microbe. 2024 Nov;5(11):100902. doi: 10.1016/S2666-5247(24)00134-4. Epub 2024 Aug 13. [PMID: 39146948]

MCE sponsor

We are pleased to announce that MedChemExpress are a new sponsor (since April 2025) of the Guide to Pharmacology website. Where ligands in GtoPdb map to compounds in MCE’s chemical libraries there are now links out from our ligand summary pages to MCE.