What is CCCdb?

One of the most fundamental questions in biology is: which cells communicate with each other during organismal growth, development, immune responses, and the pathogenesis of complex diseases. There is an urgent need for an expert-curated reference database comprising experimentally validated, gold-standard CCCs support the development of computational inference tools.
Here, we present CCCdb (http://www.licpathway.net/cccdb/index.php), a comprehensive, manually curated database of experimentally validated cell–cell communications for human and mouse. A total of 8,353 entries were extracted from thousands of publications, each annotated with standardized information on cell types, tissues, and phenotypes. These entries cover 98 tissues, 1,145 cell types, and 577 phenotypes, encompassing communication via direct contact, autocrine, paracrine, and endocrine signaling. CCCdb compiles experiment-supported CCCs across cellular subtypes, tissue interfaces, and physiological or pathological states. To enhance accessibility and biological interpretability, CCCdb integrates a ReAct-based AI assistant that enables intelligent natural-language queries and intuitive navigation through biological information. Understanding how cells communicate to maintain tissue homeostasis and drive disease progression is essential for decoding complex biological systems.