In recent years, drug repositioning has emerged as a promising alternative to the time-consuming, expensive and risky process of developing new drugs for diseases. However, the current database for drug repositioning faces several issues, including insufficient data volume, restricted data types, algorithm inaccuracies resulting from the neglect of multidimensional or heterogeneous data, a lack of systematic organization of literature data associated with drug repositioning, limited analytical capabilities and user-unfriendly webpage interfaces. Hence, we have established the first all-encompassing database called DrugRepoBank, consisting of two main modules: the ‘Literature’ module and the ‘Prediction’ module. The ‘Literature’ module serves as the largest repository of literature-supported drug repositioning data with experimental evidence, encompassing 169 repositioned drugs from 134 articles from 1 January 2000 to 1 July 2023. The ‘Prediction’ module employs 18 efficient algorithms, including similarity-based, artificial-intelligence-based, signature-based and network-based methods to predict repositioned drug candidates. The DrugRepoBank features an interactive and user-friendly web interface and offers comprehensive functionalities such as bioinformatics analysis of disease signatures. When users provide information about a drug, target or disease of interest, DrugRepoBank offers new indications and targets for the drug, proposes new drugs that bind to the target or suggests potential drugs for the queried disease. Additionally, it provides basic information about drugs, targets or diseases, along with supporting literature. We utilize three case studies to demonstrate the feasibility and effectiveness of predictively repositioned drugs within DrugRepoBank. The establishment of the DrugRepoBank database will significantly accelerate the pace of drug repositioning. Database URL:https://awi.cuhk.edu.cn/DrugRepoBank

Drug–target interactions (DTIs) are considered a crucial component of drug design and drug discovery. To date, many computational methods were developed for drug–target interactions, but they are insufficiently informative for accurately predicting DTIs due to the lack of experimentally verified negative datasets, inaccurate molecular feature representation, and ineffective DTI classifiers. Therefore, we address the limitations of randomly selecting negative DTI data from unknown drug–target pairs by establishing two experimentally validated datasets and propose a capsule network-based framework called CapBM-DTI to capture hierarchical relationships of drugs and targets, which adopts pre-trained bidirectional encoder representations from transformers (BERT) for contextual sequence feature extraction from target proteins through transfer learning and the message-passing neural network (MPNN) for the 2-D graph feature extraction of compounds to accurately and robustly identify drug–target interactions. We compared the performance of CapBM-DTI with state-of-the-art methods using four experimentally validated DTI datasets of different sizes, including human (Homo sapiens) and worm (Caenorhabditis elegans) species datasets, as well as three subsets (new compounds, new proteins, and new pairs). Our results demonstrate that the proposed model achieved robust performance and powerful generalization ability in all experiments. The case study on treating COVID-19 demonstrates the applicability of the model in virtual screening.

The hypochromic effect of bromocresol green (BCG) resulted from long-chained imidazolium ionic liquids was investigated. The hypochromic effect may be caused by the formation of the neutral complex [C_nmim]₂ ⁺[BCG]²⁻via electrostatic interaction and hydrophobic interaction. Based on the spectral characteristics, a new method for determination of long-chained imidazolium ionic liquids is developed. The proposed method can be performed using a UV-vis spectrophotometer, at the optimum λ_min. Beer's law is obeyed in the concentration range of 0.004–0.04 mmol L⁻¹ for [C₁₄mim]Br and [C₁₆mim]Cl, and the detection limits are 0.0011 and 0.00095 mmol L⁻¹ for [C₁₄mim]Br and [C₁₆mim]Cl, respectively. Meanwhile, precision, accuracy and tolerance are also very good. The method is fast, economical and does not require organic solvents; it can be applied for determination of long-chained imidazolium ionic liquids.

Deep learning-based drug-target interaction (DTI) prediction methods have demonstrated strong performance; however, real-world applicability remains constrained by limited data diversity and modeling complexity. To address these challenges, we propose SCOPE-DTI, a unified framework combining a large-scale, balanced semi-inductive human DTI dataset with advanced deep learning modeling. SCOPE-DTI is constructed from 13 public repositories and expands data volume by up to 100-fold compared to common benchmarks such as the Human dataset. The SCOPE model integrates three-dimensional protein and compound representations, graph neural networks, and bilinear attention mechanisms to effectively capture cross domain interaction patterns and outperform state-of-the-art methods across various DTI prediction tasks. Additionally, SCOPE-DTI provides a user-friendly interface and database. We further demonstrate its effectiveness by experimentally identifying anticancer targets of two bioactive natural compounds. By offering comprehensive data, advanced modeling, and accessible tools, SCOPE-DTI accelerates drug discovery research.