Theoretical investigation on QSAR of (2-Methyl-3-biphenylyl) methanol analogs as PD-L1 inhibitor

Abstract

Cancer is one of the most serious issues in human life. Blocking programmed cell death protein 1 and programmed death ligand-1 (PD-L1) pathway is one of the great innovations in the last few years, a few numbers of inhibitors can be able to block it. (2-Methyl-3-biphenylyl) methanol derivative is one of them. Here, the quantitative structure-activity relationship (QSAR) established twenty (2-methyl-3-biphenylyl) methanol derivatives as the programmed death ligand-1 inhibitors. Density functional theory at the B3LPY/6-31+G(d,p) level was employed to study the chemical structure and properties of the chosen compounds. Highest occupied molecular orbital energy EHOMO, lowest unoccupied molecular orbital energy ELUMO, total energy ET, dipole moment DM, absolute hardness η, absolute electronegativity χ, softness S, electrophilicity ω, energy gap ΔE, etc., were observed and determined. Principal component analysis (PCA), multiple linear regression (MLR) and multiple non-linear regression (MNLR) analysis were carried out to establish the QSAR. The proposed quantitative models and interpreted outcomes of the compounds were based on statistical analysis. Statistical results of MLR and MNLR exhibited the coefficient R2 was 0.661 and 0.758, respectively. Leave-one-out cross-validation, rm2 metric, rm2 test, and “Golbraikh & Tropsha’s criteria” analyses were applied for the validation of MLR and MNLR, which indicate two models are statistically significant and well stable with data variation in the external validation towards PD-L1. The obtained results showed that the MNLR model predicts the bioactivity more accurately than MLR, and it may be helpful and supporting for evaluation of the biological activity of PD-L1 inhibitors.