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drugref.org — an open drug-information commons

drugref.org is a public-good drug-information service: a registry of active drug moieties, each with an immortal identity and transparent, append-only links to the world's open drug vocabularies. Any EHR, pharmacy system, prescribing tool, or research pipeline can consume it on equal footing — free software, free data, reproducible from source.

Status — under active development

The global moiety spine, classification (MED-RT + MeSH), candidate-tier interaction / contraindication / indication projections, the GSRS composition tree, append-only curated overlay and human clinical-review workflow are built. Reviewers can research, record immutable revisions and sign them with device-local keys; administrators can manage accounts and public-key trust. The general public API and release packaging are still to come. Follow progress on GitHub.

Why it exists

Reliable drug reference data — what a substance is, how it is classified, what it interacts with — sits behind proprietary licences in most of the world. That locks safe-prescribing support to whoever can pay, and locks health-IT projects into vendors. drugref takes the opposite stance: the identity and knowledge layer of medicines is a commons, built entirely from public-domain and openly licensed sources, and published under licences that keep it open for everyone, forever.

What it provides

  • Immortal substance identity — every active moiety gets a stable UUID that never changes and is never reused, minted deterministically so independent installations agree without coordination.
  • Cross-vocabulary claims — append-only, auditable links from each moiety to UNII, InChIKey, CAS, ChEBI, RxNorm and more. Corrections supersede; they never overwrite history.
  • Classification — a source-neutral drug-class registry populated from MED-RT (mechanism of action, physiologic effect) and MeSH pharmacologic actions.
  • Interaction groundwork — class-level contraindication data from MED-RT, expanded to candidate drug–drug pairs; the advisory foundation for interaction checking, clearly tiered by evidence.
  • Drug–condition knowledge — contraindications expanded down the disease tree (a rule on Epilepsy reaches a patient coded Temporal Lobe Epilepsy) and indications generalised up it, both over a MeSH-keyed condition registry.
  • Composition tree — which registered moieties a specific substance (a salt, a hydrate) is composed of, from the FDA/NCATS GSRS public data dump.
  • Human clinical review — an authenticated desktop queue for annotations, citation-only evidence, append-only clinical revisions, complete-payload sign-off, pending counter-signatures, account administration and public-key trust. Private signing keys remain encrypted on the reviewer's device.

Two tiers

drugref is built in two tiers: the global tier (jurisdiction-independent substance identity, chemistry, classes, interactions — being built first, in this repository) and a later local tier for country-specific packaging, product, and subsidy data.

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