Doctors and researchers try to understand what medications a person has taken by asking patients directly or by looking at medical records. But this information is often incomplete. People may forget what they took, use over-the-counter drugs, take leftover prescription drugs, buy medicines online, or might be exposed unintentionally through food and the environment. As a result, significant drug exposures can be missed. Knowing what drugs an individual has been exposed to is important because they can have unexpected effects on biology and health. A team of researchers from the University of California (UC), San Diego, and their colleagues has now created a publicly available online reference library of chemical “fingerprints” from thousands of drugs, their metabolites, and related compounds. The Global Natural Product Social Molecular Networking (GNPS) Drug Library integrates MS/MS references of drugs and their metabolites/analogs with data on their exposure sources, pharmacologic classes, therapeutic indications, and mechanisms of action. Comparing unknown compounds in a patient’s blood, urine, or other biological sample to those in the GNPS Drug Library reveals a more accurate picture of their drug exposure than what is listed on a patient’s medical record, according to the researchers. The researchers reported on their development and use of the new GNPS Drug Library resource in a paper in Nature Communications titled “A resource to empirically establish drug exposure records directly from untargeted metabolomics data.” The report’s co-first author is Nina Zhao, PhD, a postdoctoral scientist in the laboratory of co-author Pieter Dorrestein, PhD, a professor at UC…
