If you’ll excuse the tongue-twister in the title, the Approved Drugs app is now available on the iTunes AppStore. There is now an official documentation page for it, which covers all the functionality. With the app being live for barely 24 hours, already ideas for enhancements are starting to manifest themselves.

One of them relates to a paper that appeared in Nature a few days after the app was submitted, entitled Large-scale prediction and testing of drug activity on side-effect targets. This paper describes a similarity-based approach for predicting the likely targets for a potential structure, by comparing it to known activities of existing structures vs. known targets – and hence creating a predictivity model for side effects.

The technology used to accomplish this is quite similar to what the Approved Drugs app already has. And the paper included quite a bit of useful source material in the supplementary information. So future revisions may just pick up the pace quite a bit!

A new app from Molecular Materials Informatics is now waiting on the iTunes AppStore: the Approved Drugs app, which provides a list of drugs (structure, name) from the set of drugs that have been approved by the FDA.
The basic interface is simple: about 1300 drugs are contained within the app itself, and when the app starts, they are displayed onscreen, in a list that can be scrolled up and down. Each entry in the list is a nicely depicted 2D structure diagram with a name underneath. Continue reading →