NC-IUPHAR Updates

“NC-IUPHAR” is the Nomenclature and Standards Committee of the International Union of Basic and Clinical Pharmacology. The mission for NC-IUPHAR was initiated in 1987 at the Xth International Congress of Pharmacology. In 1989, the Executive Committee of IUPHAR named Paul Vanhoutte (Hong Kong) as chairman of a revised and enlarged committee. This committee energetically expanded its activities and the number of subcommittees (to 33), eventually producing the first official compendium on the occasion of the XIIIth International Congress of Pharmacology at Munich in 1998. Robert Ruffolo (USA) was Chairman of NC-IUPHAR from 1998-2002. Michael Spedding (France) became Chairman in 2002 and was elected again in 2006 and 2010.

NC-IUPHAR has the objectives of:

1. Issuing guidelines for the nomenclature and classification of all the (human) biological targets, including all the targets of current and future prescription medicines;
2. Facilitating the interface between the discovery of new sequences from the Human Genome Project and the designation of the derived entities as functional biological targets and potential drug targets;
3. Designating polymorphisms and variants which are functionally important;
4. Developing an authoritative and freely available, global online resource, the IUPHAR database (http://www.iuphar-db.org), which is now accessible via the Guide to PHARMACOLOGY portal (http://www.guidetopharmacology.org), with a remit to:
   • provide access to data on all known biological targets;
   • enable students and scientists in academia and industry, working in areas related to pharmacology and drug/target research, to exploit the full potential of the considerable amount of information on drug action available in the published literature;
   • provide an entry point into the pharmacological literature for basic and clinical scientists from other disciplines;
   • provide an integrated educational resource with access to high quality training in the principles of basic and clinical pharmacology and techniques;
   • foster innovative drug discovery.

NC-IUPHAR Section Update from Dr. Steven Alexander

There have been several publications from NC-IUPHAR in the British Journal of Pharmacology in 2022, some of which were initiated from the twice-yearly meetings of the Nomenclature and Standards Committee (see below). These twice-yearly meetings (in spring and fall) continue to take place as virtual meetings, although it is anticipated that the spring 2023 meeting will allow attendees from within Europe to gather in Paris for discussions. As always, a central focus of these meetings is the database at GuidetoPharmacology.org and the provision of evidence-based content. Beyond these meetings, a current focus of NC-IUPHAR is a systematic analysis of the Family A orphan GPCR, with a view to identifying provisional putative endogenous ligands and reviewing evidence for deorphanizations.