DrugBank Database — Local XML Access

Overview

Query the DrugBank comprehensive drug database (14,000+ drug entries, 5,000+ protein targets, 17,000+ drug interactions) by parsing the locally downloaded XML file with Python's ElementTree. Covers drug lookups, interaction checking, target/pathway extraction, chemical property analysis, and cross-database identifier mapping.

When to Use

• Looking up drug information (description, indication, mechanism, pharmacology) by DrugBank ID, name, or CAS number
• Checking drug-drug interactions and severity classifications for polypharmacy safety
• Extracting drug targets, enzymes, transporters, and carriers with UniProt accessions
• Retrieving chemical properties (SMILES, InChI, molecular weight) for cheminformatics analysis
• Mapping DrugBank entries to external databases (PubChem, ChEMBL, UniProt, KEGG)
• Building drug similarity matrices from molecular fingerprints
• For live bioactivity data (IC50, Ki, EC50) use chembl-database-bioactivity instead
• For compound property lookups without downloading a database use pubchem-compound-search instead

Prerequisites