Exploring molecular fragments for fraction unbound in human plasma of chemicals: a fragment-based cheminformatics approach

Abstract

ABSTRACT Fraction unbound in plasma (f u,p) of drugs is an significant factor for drug delivery and other biological incidences related to the pharmacokinetic behaviours of drugs. Exploration of different molecular fragments for f u,p of different small molecules/agents can facilitate in identification of suitable candidates in the preliminary stage of drug discovery. Different researchers have implemented strategies to build several prediction models for f u,p of different drugs. However, these studies did not focus on the identification of responsible molecular fragments to determine the fraction unbound in plasma. In the current work, we tried to focus on the development of robust classification-based QSAR models and evaluated these models with multiple statistical metrics to identify essential molecular fragments/structural attributes for fractions unbound in plasma. The study unequivocally suggests various N-containing aromatic rings and aliphatic groups have positive influences and sulphur-containing thiadiazole rings have negative influences for the f u,p values. The molecular fragments may help for the assessment of the f u,p values of different small molecules/drugs in a speedy way in comparison to experiment-based in vivo and in vitro studies.