With guidance from NC-IUPHAR (the Nomenclature and Standards Committee of International Union for Basic and Clinical Pharmacology), the British Pharmacological Society (BPS), and over 700 experts worldwide, I work with a team of database developers and curators to undertake the curation and annotation of the pharmacological, physiological and genetic properties of human and rodent receptors, ion channels and other drug targets, together with the substances that act on them, from the primary literature and external resources, for the IUPHAR/BPS Guide to PHARMACOLOGY database (GtoPdb).

Together, NC-IUPHAR and the British Pharmacological Society (BPS) oversee the development of GtoPdb (https://www.guidetopharmacology.org/), a database for information on the targets of licensed drugs and other targets of current research interest, such as those linked to human disease. With support from the Wellcome Trust, and BPS, GtoPdb is being expanded to cover all the (human) targets of current licensed drugs and those with potential to be targets of future therapeutics, including immunological targets.

Our goal is to provide scientists, doctors, allied professions and the general public with a ‘one stop shop’ source of information on how drugs work, and to help researchers to design experiments using the appropriate reagents.