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xPharm: a critical decision support tool for Pharmacology professionals & students
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Who is xPharm designed to support?
xPharm is designed for bench scientists who utilize drugs and other chemical agents as tools to manipulate their experimental systems. Besides pharmacologists, this would include virtually all biological scientists involved in biomedical research. It is also useful for academic and industrial medicinal and pharmaceutical chemists as these individuals are routinely seeking out biological target information on their favorite pharmacophores.
Besides these groups, xPharm is of value as a teaching aid for those lecturing in the area, and as a reference work for graduate students and postdoctoral fellows in pharmacology, both in schools of medicine and pharmacy.
The material in xPharm is also be of value to clinician-scientists, especially those engaged in clinical trials of potential drugs or who are searching for new clinical uses for established agents.
What is the value of xPharm?
The solution contains four distinct sections:
Targets
Principles
Disorders
Agents
This highlights the fact that all four of these areas, which form the basis of pharmacology, are comprehensively covered and linked to one another.
Unlike its competitors, xPharm contains both drugs and experimental agents and provides such details as the solubility of the agent, its commercial source for laboratory research, its chemical stability, its molecular weight, and chemical structure, as well as other fundamental information of value to the bench scientist.
xPharm also offers the advantage of treating all drugs and chemical tools equally, with the same information provided in every case, assuming such information is publicly available. Most importantly for users, xPharm includes critically important information for those bench scientists considering the use of a particular agent for laboratory research. Thus, if a scientist wants to identify an agent known to selectively block a particular enzyme or receptor, using xPharm they can readily determine whether such a substance exists and, if so, where can be purchased, and how it should be used.
Saving time in research workflow
The user will also find in xPharm the doses that are used in laboratory animals, or concentrations employed for in vitro work. Such information saves the bench scientists a great deal of time and money because it obviates the need to undertake preliminary experiments and makes it easier to compare results in the users laboratory with published data to confirm the validity of an assay.
In the absence of xPharm the investigator would have to go to PubMed or some other indexing system to wade through the primary literature to find such information. Also in this case the investigator would have to make some judgements about the quality of the work he is reading and the reliability of the reported data. Because they are unreviewed sources such as online wikis, or information provided by commercial suppliers online, can be unreliable. With xPharm an authoritative determination is made about which published data are the most definitive and reliable. If the substance is not a drug, but only an experimental tool, the interested scientist is unlikely to even find it mentioned in competing products, let alone be given any basic information on ways to can be used experimentally.
Target database
Another distinguishing feature of xPharm is the target database. Indeed, some users might find this the most valuable section of the work. Again, while drug mechanisms of action, and therefore drug targets, are mentioned in competing offerings, the description of these targets is highly variable, with most receiving only passing mention, or a few sentences at most. In xPharm, critical details of drug targets are provide in every case in a clear, concise and uniform fashion, with journal and book citations for those interested in pursuing the issue in more depth.
Included in xPharm is precise information on the relevant genes, the amino acid composition, as well as the organ and cellular localization, of protein targets, Genbank and Swisspro designations, and various and sundry bits of crucial details about splice variants, species differences, and regulation of gene expression, critical information for the bench scientist. There is also a discussion of the availability, and reliability, of reagents for identifying these gene products, and of the experimentally determined affinity of the site for drugs and other chemical substances. Accordingly, a quick run through the xPharm record reveals the basic information needed to determine whether this is a target worth pursuing and provides invaluable assistance in designing the most appropriate experiments to study the target and to identify agents that interact with this site. Again, without xPharm, the investigator would have to comb through the primary literature to obtain this information, a processes requiring hours of labor. xPharm is the only resource available to scientists and students today that contains in one place this type of basic and clinical information.
The xPharm Disorders database is also unique in providing concise information on the pathophysiology and treatment of conditions that respond to pharmacotherapies. While competitors do delve into these matters for a number of disease states, such coverage is inconsistent, whereas with xPharm it is uniform and universal, with a greater emphasis on experimental therapies under investigation, or theoretical frameworks for devising novel therapeutic approaches.
As for Principles, the xPharm topic coverage is similar to competing offerings, but with xPharm being a bit more comprehensive in some areas. The illustrations in the xPharm Principles section are greater in number and superior to those found in competing offerings. This is of great value to students and instructors in the field. Another xPharm strength in Principles is, as is true for all four sections, the ability to readily link to agents, targets or disorders that are mentioned in a Principles record for instant elaboration on a question that may arise. To accomplish the same thing with competing products it is necessary to flip back and forth among pages and wade through extraneous information to find the relevant information.
Comprehensive coverage
While it is impossible to be precise in responding to this query, listed below are some general guidelines you may wish to consider when addressing this issue.
Principles: xPharm’s coverage of the basic principles of pharmacology is comprehensive and complete.
Targets: Includes vast majority of known drug targets.
Disorders: xPharm includes virtually all disorders that are treated with drugs. By definition this excludes conditions that are not managed with pharmacotherapies. For example, there is little or no mention of un-treatable infectious diseases, bone fractures, face lifts, and laser eye surgery because there is nothing that can be discussed about the pharmacological management of these conditions. Disorders are only covered if there are drugs known to treat them.
Agents: It is impossible to quantify the percentage of all possible agents covered in xPharm as the total number of such substances is unknown and unknowable. Virtually any chemical can be used as a research tool. There are xPharm records on both drugs and drug classes. For example, barbiturates were first developed around the turn of the 20th century. Since then some 2,000 different barbiturates have been synthesized and tested as possible drugs, with several hundred different ones marketed in various countries over the past century. The use of most has now been supplanted by newer sedative-hypnotic agents. xPharm contains a record on barbiturates, as well as individual records on several, but certainly not all, barbiturates that have been used clinically. Selection of individual agents for coverage is usually driven by the extent to which they are still used clinically or experimentally. However, someone could type in the name of a particular barbiturate that is not covered in xPharm, and may never be covered in xPharm. Nonetheless, its general properties are discussed in the barbiturate class record. On the other hand, this particular barbiturate may be mentioned in passing in one of the individual barbiturate records, but not have a record devoted to it. In this case the user will at least be directed to a site in the system where the subject is noted.
As for experimental agents, emphasis is placed on including those that are most commonly used, although being somewhat subjective this designation may differ from scientist to scientist.
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