Trends & Insights: Researcher Highlights Winter Edition

Discover how Academic Researchers use DrugBank data to power groundbreaking research.

Trends & Insights: Researcher Highlights Winter Edition

DrugBank is passionate about propelling innovation and equipping leading researchers with the data they need for new discoveries. As a trusted partner to numerous world-renowned researchers, we are proud to be contributing to groundbreaking research and aiding in solving some of the industry's most pressing issues. Our products help academic researchers drive innovation and push research further.

Our Curation team has put together a highlight of some impressive academic researchers, their work, and how they powered their research with DrugBank's data:

Dr. Yannick Berker, Postdoc

  • Doctor of Theoretical Medicine from RWTH Aachen University
  • Postdoctoral Fellow, Hopp Children's Cancer Center Heidelberg (KiTZ), Germany

Research Focus: Dr. Berker is focused on medical image reconstruction and developing a web app that integrates comprehensive data for external users to upload their drug screening measurements. This research validates a cost-effective drug combination screening approach and reveals the application’s ability to identify potential sample-specific biomarkers based on drug-target interaction networks.

DrugBank Powered Research: Dr. Berker has developed a R/Shiny web app where users can upload experimental data and DrugBank drug annotations. This app will require users to download data from DrugBank themselves. In order to visualize the drug interaction networks, the drug target genes were annotated to the 76 drug library using the DrugBank database.

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Dr. Adele Doyle, Assistant Professor

  • The University of California, Santa Barbara (UCSB), USA
  • Leads the Doyle Lab
  • Neuroscience Research Institute
  • Center for BioEngineering; Assistant Prof. of Mech. Engineering
  • Postdoctorate in Systems Biology from Harvard University

Research Focus: Dr. Adele studies mechanisms by which cells sense mechanical and electrical cues. The lab has identified gene targets important for cardiovascular physical cell health. The current research is predicting therapeutic targets for cardiovascular cell homeostasis. The identification of gene targets by the lab has led them to hypothesize that existing drugs can modulate these genes and pathways and, in turn, modulate cell behaviour.

DrugBank Powered Research: The research will rely on DrugBank's comprehensive and systematically referenced database to test their hypothesis. Using this data, they hope to learn whether or not existing drugs can modulate genes and pathways important for cardiovascular physical cell health.

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Dr. Michael Chary, MD-PhD

  • Department of Emergency Medicine, Weill Cornell
  • Assistant Attending Physician - NewYork-Presbyterian Hospital
  • Weill Cornell Medicine, New York, USA
  • MD-PhD from Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai,
  • BS from NYU

Research Focus: Dr. Chary's drug discovery research is using artificial intelligence to do syndromic surveillance of social media as a means of creating computable knowledge representations.

DrugBank Powered Research: This research will use DrugBank to discover potential drug-drug interactions from substances described on the internet. To do this DrugBank will be used to perform a large-scale analysis.

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Maya Durvasula, JD-PhD Candidate

  • A Knight-Hennessy Scholar
  • Currently pursuing a JD-PhD (Economics) at Stanford University
  • Stanford University, Stanford, USA
  • BS in Economics from Duke University

Research Focus: The research includes projects on HIV testing, household behaviour following economic shocks, historical housing policy, and assessing the consequences of banknote demonetization and national tax reform. This involves technology diffusion and distribution in low-income contexts. This research will focus on academic publications within the field of economics.

DrugBank Powered Research: Academic research on factors influencing the development and diffusion of novel therapies. Durvasula intends to use this information for academic publications, with the journal of interest being within the field of economics.

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Dr. Xiao Xie, Postdoc

  • The Chang Lab
  • California Institute for Quantitative Biosciences at UC Berkeley
  • The University of California, Berkeley, USA
  • Obtained Ph.D. from Peking University in 2019

Research Focus: Dr. Xie's current research is focused on developing platforms that specifically and efficiently modify proteins and small molecules. This research has the potential to result in tools for the study of cellular pathways and creation of therapeutic interventions.

DrugBank Powered Research: DrugBank data will be deployed to search for ligands of protein targets as well as to aid in finding drugs for key proteins. It will further support developing platforms to efficiently and specifically modify proteins with small molecules, such as sugars, fluorescent dyes and drugs. The researcher is hoping their methodologies can be deployed as a tool for cellular pathway studies and for the creation of new therapeutic inventions.


Researchers with a range of focuses from across the globe choose DrugBank as their source for reliable, verified data. From using our structured data to validate machine learning models to finding potential drug candidates, we offer data-driven solutions for many use cases.

DrugBank's database includes more than 21,000 drug-protein interactions, 130,000 drug product listings, drug-target data that includes proteins, gene identifiers, sequences, and so much more. With both paid and free academic licenses available, there are options to suit all of your research needs.

Learn more about our Academic datasets and see how we can help you get to your findings faster.