WWAD (World Wide Approved Drugs)

is a freely accessible, web-based database that provides comprehensive, manually curated information on approved low-molecular-weight drug substances collected from national medicine registers and official regulatory documents of 88 countries and regions worldwide. Unlike most existing drug databases that focus exclusively on medicines authorized in the United States and Europe, WWAD aggregates data on drugs approved by regulatory authorities across all major regions, including Asia, Latin America, Africa, and the post-Soviet states, covering substances whose records are often absent from popular resources such as DrugBank.

Database uniqueness

The database currently contains information on 4,596 unique pharmaceutical substances (Active Pharmaceutical Ingredients, API) interacting with 1,975 molecular targets and covering 1,192 therapeutic indications and 2,669 types of biological activity. Each record includes standardized drug names and synonyms, chemical structure representations (MOL, SMILES, and InChI formats), ATC classification codes, routes of administration, molecular target interactions with source links, therapeutic indications, PDB ligand identifiers, and predicted biological activity spectra generated by PASS software. For registered academic users, WWAD provides access to 3,889 API not classified as narcotic, psychotropic, or toxic compounds under current Russian Federation law.

How do you use it?

The web interface presents all data in an interactive searchable table with filtering options by drug name, therapeutic indication, regulatory authority, and first-approval date. The standardized chemical structures and unified biological activity terminology make the WWAD data directly applicable in computer-aided drug design (CADD) workflows without additional preprocessing. Key practical applications include knowledge discovery about approved therapeutics, drug repositioning via virtual screening and PASS-based activity prediction, enrichment of structure–activity relationship datasets with globally approved but locally unknown drugs, and novelty assessment of newly synthesized compounds against the global drug chemical space.

Practical use

WWAD supports a broad range of research and development tasks in the biomedical and pharmaceutical sciences. Researchers can use the database to search for detailed information on approved drugs, including their molecular targets, interaction types, therapeutic indications, and known biological activities, providing a reliable reference grounded in official regulatory documentation. The assembled collection of standardized drug structures enables drug repositioning studies, for example, virtual screening against viral proteases or PASS-based prediction of new therapeutic indications for existing drugs, as demonstrated by the discovery of antineoplastic potential in the antimalarial compound pyronaridine. WWAD also serves as a high-quality training and benchmarking dataset for QSAR and other in silico modeling methods, since all structures are curated, standardized, and free of biologics, inorganic compounds, and metal-organic entities that are typically excluded from such workflows. Finally, the global coverage of the database makes it a unique tool for novelty assessment of newly synthesized compounds, allowing researchers to evaluate structural similarity against the world-wide approved pharmacotherapeutic chemical space rather than just the US/EU-approved fraction.