Drug Ontology Home

Welcome the Drug Ontology (DrOn) Wiki!

The Drug Ontology (DrOn) was originally created to enable comparative effectiveness and health services researchers to query for National Drug Codes that represent products by ingredient, by molecular disposition (e.g., beta-adrenergic receptor molecule blockade), by therapeutic disposition (e.g., antihypertensive), and by physiological effect (e.g., diuretic).

2016-08-04: New version of DrOn released!

We have updated DrOn to include all cumulative updates to RxNorm through May, 2016.

This version adds a new module to DrOn: dron-hand.owl.  You need to update any processes you have that read the individual, module OWL files to include this file as well.

Beginning with this release, DrOn contains:

  1. Anti-hypertensives: information on whether a drug product is used to treat hypertension.
  2. Anti-malarials: information on whether a drug product is used to treat and/or prophylax against malaria. 
  3. Opioid analgesics: mechanisms of action and information on whether opioid drug products are used to treat pain.

2015-07-31: New version of DrOn released!

We have updated DrOn to include all cumulative updates to RxNorm through July, 2015.  

Please note: the previous release of DrOn added a new module, dron-ingredient.owl.  You need to update any processes you have that read the individual, module OWL files to include this file as well.

Beginning with this release, DrOn contains:

  1. Dose form information now correctly captured for nearly all drug products
  2. Information on whether ingredient is an angiotensin receptor blocker (function-inhibiting angiotensin receptor binding disposition)
  3. Corrections to existing mechanisms of action that were missing from some ingredients
  4. Fix to malformed URI for has_RxCUI annotation property

The PURL to DrOn Lite is: http://purl.obolibrary.org/obo/dron/dev/dron-lite.owl

The PURL to DrOn Full is: http://purl.obolibrary.org/obo/dron.owl

Statistics for this release:

Type of entity CountChange from last release (April 2015)
National drug codes449,72510,356
Ingredients 4,469341
Clinical drug form 14,187152
Clinical drug 35,8571,297
Branded drug21,2480
Excipients1,434341

Where to get DrOn

The permanent URL (PURL) for the latest release of DrOn will always be at: http://purl.obolibrary.org/obo/dron.owl

The PURL for the development version of DrOn will always be at: http://purl.obolibrary.org/obo/dron/dev/dron.owl 

Log an Issue

The issue tracker for DrOn is here.

Uses of DrOn

An application that uses DrOn to generate lists of National Drug Codes (NDCs) with certain ingredients (e.g., metoprolol), or with ingredients that have certain properties (beta-adrenergic inhibition), is the Ingredient Searcher.  Try it here.

Notes and Disclaimers

DrOn contains content curated by the National Library of Medicine in RxNORM.

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