An initial ingredient analysis of drugs approved by China food and drug administration

Drug is an important part of medicine. Drug knowledge bases that organize and manage drugs have attracted considerable attention, and have been widely used in human health care in many countries and regions. There are also a large number of electronic drug knowledge bases publicly available. In China, however, there is hardly any publicly available well-structured drug knowledge base, may due to two different types of medicine: Chinese traditional medicine (CTM) and modern medicine (ME). In order to build an electronic knowledge base of drugs approved by China Food and Drug Administration (CFDA), we developed a preliminary ingredient drug analysis system. This system collects all drug names from the website of CFDA, obtains their manuals from three medical websites, extracts the ingredients of drugs, and analyses the distribution of the extracted ingredients. Totally, 12,918 out of 19,490 drug manuals were collected. Evaluation on randomly selected 50 drug manuals shows that the system achieves an F-score of 95.46% on ingredient extraction. According to the distribution of the extraction ingredients, we find that ingredient multiplexing is very common in medicine, especially in herbal medicine, which may provide a clue for drug safety as taking more than one type of drug that contains partially the same ingredients may cause overtaking the same ingredients.