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Background Natural products have increasingly attracted much attention as a valuable resource for the development of anticancer medicines due to the structural novelty and good bioavailability. This necessitates a comprehensive database for the natural products and the fractional extracts whose anticancer activities have been verified.DescriptionNPCARE (http://silver.sejong.ac.kr/npcare) is a publicly accessible online database of natural products and fractional extracts for cancer regulation. At NPCARE, one can explore 6578 natural compounds and 2566 fractional extracts isolated from 1952 distinct biological species including plants, marine organisms, fungi, and bacteria whose anticancer activities were validated with 1107 cell lines for 34 cancer types. Each entry in NPCARE is annotated with the cancer type, genus and species names of the biological resource, the cell line used for demonstrating the anticancer activity, PubChem ID, and a wealth of information about the target gene or protein. Besides the augmentation of plant entries up to 743 genus and 197 families, NPCARE is further enriched with the natural products and the fractional extracts of diverse non-traditional biological resources.ConclusionsNPCARE is anticipated to serve as a dominant gateway for the discovery of new anticancer medicines due to the inclusion of a large number of the fractional extracts as well as the natural compounds isolated from a variety of biological resources.Electronic supplementary materialThe online version of this article (doi:10.1186/s13321-016-0188-5) contains supplementary material, which is available to authorized users.

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