Therapeutic target database update 2016: enriched resource for bench to clinical drug target and targeted pathway information

Extensive drug discovery efforts have yielded many approved and candidate drugs targeting various targets in different biological pathways. Several freely accessible databases provide the drug, target and drug-targeted pathway information for facilitating drug discovery efforts, but there is an insufficient coverage of the clinical trial drugs and the drug-targeted pathways. Here, we describe an update of the Therapeutic Target Database (TTD) previously featured in NAR. The updated contents include: (i) significantly increased coverage of the clinical trial targets and drugs (1.6 and 2.3 times of the previous release, respectively), (ii) cross-links of most TTD target and drug entries to the corresponding pathway entries of KEGG, MetaCyc/BioCyc, NetPath, PANTHER pathway, Pathway Interaction Database (PID), PathWhiz, Reactome and WikiPathways, (iii) the convenient access of the multiple targets and drugs cross-linked to each of these pathway entries and (iv) the recently emerged approved and investigative drugs. This update makes TTD a more useful resource to complement other databases for facilitating the drug discovery efforts. TTD is accessible at http://bidd.nus.edu.sg/group/ttd/ttd.asp.