ASDCD: Antifungal Synergistic Drug Combination Database

Xing Chen,Ming Chen,Wei Ren,Biao Ren,Li-Xin Zhang,Quan-Xin Wang,Gui-Ying Yan,Ming-Xi Liu,Alix Therese Coste

doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0086499

Abstract

Finding effective drugs to treat fungal infections has important clinical significance based on high mortality rates, especially in an immunodeficient population. Traditional antifungal drugs with single targets have been reported to cause serious side effects and drug resistance. Nowadays, however, drug combinations, particularly with respect to synergistic interaction, have attracted the attention of researchers. In fact, synergistic drug combinations could simultaneously affect multiple subpopulations, targets, and diseases. Therefore, a strategy that employs synergistic antifungal drug combinations could eliminate the limitations noted above and offer the opportunity to explore this emerging bioactive chemical space. However, it is first necessary to build a powerful database in order to facilitate the analysis of drug combinations. To address this gap in our knowledge, we have built the first Antifungal Synergistic Drug Combination Database (ASDCD), including previously published synergistic antifungal drug combinations, chemical structures, targets, target-related signaling pathways, indications, and other pertinent data. Its current version includes 210 antifungal synergistic drug combinations and 1225 drug-target interactions, involving 105 individual drugs from more than 12,000 references. ASDCD is freely available at http://ASDCD.amss.ac.cn.

Highlights

Researchers across many scientific domains have responded to the increasing lack of effective drugs and increasing drugresistant pathogenic strains by studying the feasibility of combinatorial therapy
[13];2) the same target model involves two synergistic drugs that tend to target different sites of the same protein [14]; 3) the parallel pathway inhibition model proposes that two drugs will be synergistic if they inhibit two proteins on parallel pathways essential for an observed phenotype [15]; and, 4) the bioavailability model suggests that two drugs will be synergistic if one drug’s action helps another drug’s availability in the target cells [4]
The page goes on to present the relevant history and significance of synergistic drug combinations, including a figure which fully demonstrates the benefits of combinatorial drug therapy and some well-established drug combinations used for cancer, HIV, bacterial infections and others

Summary

Introduction

Researchers across many scientific domains have responded to the increasing lack of effective drugs and increasing drugresistant pathogenic strains by studying the feasibility of combinatorial therapy. ASDCD would be specially designed for the input of synergistic antifungal drug combinations and provide a powerful search tool and research platform to facilitate drug combination analysis and new antifungal drug development. ASDCD includes information about published synergistic antifungal drug combinations, chemical structures, drug targets, target-related signaling pathways, drug indications and other pertinent data.

Results

Conclusion