Hologram QSAR model for the prediction of human oral bioavailability

Abstract

A drug intended for use in humans should have an ideal balance of pharmacokinetics and safety, as well as potency and selectivity. Unfavorable pharmacokinetics can negatively affect the clinical development of many otherwise promising drug candidates. A variety of in silico ADME (absorption, distribution, metabolism, and excretion) models are receiving increased attention due to a better appreciation that pharmacokinetic properties should be considered in early phases of the drug discovery process. Human oral bioavailability is an important pharmacokinetic property, which is directly related to the amount of drug available in the systemic circulation to exert pharmacological and therapeutic effects. In the present work, hologram quantitative structure–activity relationships (HQSAR) were performed on a training set of 250 structurally diverse molecules with known human oral bioavailability. The most significant HQSAR model ( q 2 = 0.70, r 2 = 0.93) was obtained using atoms, bond, connection, and chirality as fragment distinction. The predictive ability of the model was evaluated by an external test set containing 52 molecules not included in the training set, and the predicted values were in good agreement with the experimental values. The HQSAR model should be useful for the design of new drug candidates having increased bioavailability as well as in the process of chemical library design, virtual screening, and high-throughput screening.