E$$ENTIAL MEDICINE$ database creation

Stage I of E$$ENTIAL MEDICINE$ focused on essential medicines in the USA, identifying the different products approved for use in the USA, manufacturers, FDA approval dates and different versions of the medicine approved, which are also called generics. We aimed to create a database of essential medicines that are approved for use in the USA. To do this, we used the Food and Drug Administration’s (FDA) Orange Book, which contains loads of information on approved drug products in the USA.

We have been blown away with the response from the community! In just a few weeks since the project launch we received 120 entries and verified information for 25 essential medicines!

We have also had some really productive conversations on GitHub which is the platform we use to share and communicate everything to do with E$$ENTIAL MEDICINE$. These conversations have sparked some new directions and developments for the E$$ENTIAL MEDICINE$. We were especially excited by the suggestion to build an automation code for extracting information from the USA orange book, which would save us, and all of you, a lot of time and effort. And with help from E$$ENTIAL MEDICINE$ volunteers, this code has now been developed.

Many participants have already manually collected and contributed data to the project, and these contributions have been pivotal in facilitating the automation progress. And this is how:

First, we followed our original plan and used your manual contributions to the Google form. Three members of the community separately added data for each medicine. We then collated the three entries to confirm the accuracy of the data, and could then remove the medicine from the form. Now we’ve been able to compare these data with the results obtained by the newly developed code for each medicine. We are happy to report it has produced a dataset with quality and accuracy that matches the one produced through the manual review conducted by all of you wonderful contributors.

Given this new development, we have now closed the manual collection of data for Stage I of E$$ENTIAL MEDICINE$. We thank everyone who has participated and contributed to creating a database of essential medicines that are approved for use in the USA.

how do I Access the E$$ENTIAL MEDICINE$ database?

The database is being compiled, but an excel version of the data can be accessed here.

What’s coming next?

Stage II of E$$ENTIAL MEDICINE$ is now open for contributions!

Investigating the ownership history of medicines, Stage II of E$$ENTIAL MEDICINE$ will collect information on important life events of essential medicines which will be used to create a Circle of Life for these medicines. Click here for more information.

In the next stages of this project we will go global. We’ll expand our review to include many other countries and find out even more information on medicine pricing, the chemical structures of different medicine and how we can make them in the laboratory.