CPIExtract: A software package to collect and harmonize small molecule and protein interactions

The binding interactions between small molecules and proteins are the basis of cellular functions. Yet, experimental data available regarding compound-protein interaction is not harmonized into a single entity but rather scattered across multiple institutions, each maintaining databases with different formats. Extracting information from these multiple sources remains challenging due to data heterogeneity. Here, we present CPIExtract (Compound-Protein Interaction Extract), a tool to interactively extract experimental binding interaction data from multiple databases, perform filtering, and harmonize the resulting information, thus providing a gain of compound-protein interaction data. When compared to a single source, DrugBank, we show that it can collect more than 10 times the amount of annotations. The end-user can apply custom filtering to the aggregated output data and save it in any generic tabular file suitable for further downstream tasks such as network medicine analyses for drug repurposing and cross-validation of deep learning models.