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Chemistry databases have a way of building on top of one another to reveal new insights. In today's installment of our continuing series on free chemistry databases and Web services, we take a look at Side Effect Resource (SIDER).

SIDER is organized around the side-effects observed with marketed drugs, as determined primarily by product inserts. Relationships between drugs and side effects can be explored by browsing by the names of side effect or drugs. Text-based searching for either side effects or drug names is also possible.

Finding connections between side effects and drugs is especially easy due to the way these relationships are hyperlinked. For example, the entry for Gabapentin lists all known side effects of the drug, each of which are hyperlinked to a page dedicated to that side effect. Clicking on Ataxia, for example, I'm taken to a page that shows me that this side effect is shared by dozens of other drugs, one of which is Risperidone. Going back to Gabapentin, we can click within the colored data presentation to find the exact primary reference being cited. Simply beautiful.

A very interesting feature of SIDER is the visual presentation of side effect profiles. Again referring to the entry for Gabapentin, we see a color-coded map of the side effect profile that concisely summarizes a wealth of human clinical data.

SIDER has many applications, one of the most interesting of which is the prediction of drug-target correlations for non-analogous chemical structures. For those with an interest in data mining, SIDER's underlying dataset is freely downloadable under various forms of Creative Commons licenses.

One of the most interesting things about SIDER is how it was created: completely from information available to the public. One of those sources is the STITCH database, which maps interactions of small molecules and proteins. It should come as no surprise that STITCH itself uses PubChem. In other words, SIDER relies indirectly on PubChem for mapping drug label information onto chemical structure.

For those looking for information on side effects of marketed drugs, or ways to use that phenotypic information to discover new relationships, SIDER is an excellent resource.

Kudos

• Streamlined, elegant design.
• Color-coded information summary.
• Primary sources included for some data.
• Data freely downloadable.
• Global statistics and search interface on home page.

Ideas for Improvement

• More prominent display of chemical structures - side effect summary pages like this one are a good example of where this would be very helpful to medicinal chemists.
• Hyperlink to source of primary information.
• Add the name of side effects and drugs to URLs for better search engine discoverability.
• Feeds for new drug or side-effect entries.