Drug-Path: a database for drug-induced pathways

Some databases for drug-associated pathways have been built and are publicly available. However, the pathways curated in most of these databases are drug-action or drug-metabolism pathways. In recent years, high-throughput technologies such as microarray and RNA-sequencing have produced lots of drug-induced gene expression profiles. Interestingly, drug-induced gene expression profile frequently show distinct patterns, indicating that drugs normally induce the activation or repression of distinct pathways. Therefore, these pathways contribute to study the mechanisms of drugs and drug-repurposing. Here, we present Drug-Path, a database of drug-induced pathways, which was generated by KEGG pathway enrichment analysis for drug-induced upregulated genes and downregulated genes based on drug-induced gene expression datasets in Connectivity Map. Drug-Path provides user-friendly interfaces to retrieve, visualize and download the drug-induced pathway data in the database. In addition, the genes deregulated by a given drug are highlighted in the pathways. All data were organized using SQLite. The web site was implemented using Django, a Python web framework. Finally, we believe that this database will be useful for related researches.