New concise guide to pharmacology offers key information on major drug targets

The Concise Guide to PHARMACOLOGY 2017/18 is now available in the British Journal of Pharmacology. Published by Wiley on behalf of the British Pharmacological Society, the 440 page guide includes overviews of key properties for close to 1,700 human drug targets, identifies 3,500 ligands including more than 2,400 synthetic organic molecules and over 50 antibodies. Over 4,000 interactions between ligands and targets are quantified, allowing researchers to assess the potency of these interactions.

This open access knowledgebase of major drug targets is completely linked and divided into eight major areas of research focus:

• G protein-coupled receptors
• Ligand-gated ion channels
• Voltage-gated ion channels
• Other ion channels
• Nuclear hormone receptors
• Catalytic receptors
• Enzymes
• Transporters

"As a pharmacologist, being able to access freely information on current human drug targets is vital to discovering new therapeutics," said Steve Alexander, Associate Professor of Molecular Pharmacology, Faculty of Medicine & Health Sciences at the University of Nottingham and Lead Editor of the Concise Guide.

The Concise Guide provides an authoritative voice on nomenclature of these pharmacological targets through close links with NC-IUPHAR. It offers summary information on the best available pharmacological tools, alongside key references and suggestions for further reading.

"The Concise Guide to PHARMACOLOGY is the drug discovery researchers' bible," said Amrita Ahluwalia, Co-Director, The William Harvey Research Institute, Professor of Vascular Pharmacology at Barts & The London School of Medicine & Dentistry, and Editor-in-Chief of the British Journal of Pharmacology. "We are pleased to once again make the Concise Guide freely available to our colleagues around the globe at http://www.guidetopharmacology.org/concise."

This edition of the Concise Guide was compiled with the help of over 150 collaborators representing industry and academia from 22 countries across four continents. The British Pharmacological Society would like to thank the Universities of Cambridge, Edinburgh, Nottingham in the UK, and Monash, Australia for their contributions to updating the Concise Guide to PHARMACOLOGY.