QSAR analysis of coumarin-based benzamides as histone deacetylase inhibitors using CoMFA, CoMSIA and HQSAR methods

Histone deacetylases (HDACs) as the promising therapeutic targets for the treatment of cancer and other diseases, modify chromatin structure and contribute to aberrant gene expression in cancer. Inhibition of HDACs is emerging as an important strategy in human cancer therapy and HDAC inhibitors (HDACIs) enable histone to maintain a high degree of acetylation. In this work, molecular modeling studies, including CoMFA, CoMFA-RF, CoMSIA and HQSAR and molecular docking were performed on a series of coumarin-based benzamides as HDAC inhibitors. The statistical qualities of generated models were justified by internal and external validation, i.e., cross-validated correlation coefficient (q2), non-crossvalidated correlation coefficient (r2 ncv) and predicted correlation coefficient (r2 pred), respectively. The CoMFA (q2, 0.728; r2 ncv, 0.982; r2 pred; 0.685), CoMFA-RF (q2, 0.764; r2 ncv, 0.960; r2 pred; 0.552), CoMSIA (q2, 0.671; r2 ncv, 0.977; r2 pred; 0.721) and HQSAR models (q2, 0.811; r2 ncv, 0.986; r2 pred; 0.613) for training and test set of HDAC inhibition of HCT116 cell line yielded significant statistical results. Therefore, these QSAR models were excellent, robust and had better predictive capability. Contour maps of the QSAR models were generated and validated by molecular docking study. The final QSAR models could be useful for the design and development of novel potent HDAC inhibitors in cancer treatment. The amido and amine groups of benzamide part as scaffold and the bulk groups as a hydrophobic part were key factors to improve inhibitory activity of HDACIs

Development and Evaluation of ADME Models Using Proprietary and Opensource Data

Absorption, Distribution, Metabolism and Elimination (ADME) properties are important factors in the drug discovery pipeline. Literature ADME data are often collected in large chemical databases like ChEMBL, which might be an asset to improve the prediction of ADME properties. Pharmaceutical companies build ADME Quantitative Structure Property Relationships (QSPR) models using proprietary data and thus the inclusion of literature data might be a valuable source for the development of predictive models. The aim of this study was to investigate whether merging literature and proprietary data could improve the predictive activity of proprietary models and enlarge their applicability domain (AD). ADME predictive models for Caco-2 (A to B) permeability and LogD7.4 were built with data extracted from Evotec and ChEMBL database. Predictive models were developed for each property and three different training sets were used based on: proprietary compounds (Evotec models), literature compounds (ChEMBL models) and a merged set of proprietary and literature compounds (Evotec+ChEMBL models). The Random Forest (RF), Partial Least Squares (PLS) and Support Vector Regression (SVR) were used to develop the models. The performance of the models was evaluated by using two types of test sets: a diverse test set (20 % compounds of available data randomly selected) and a temporal test set (data published after the models were built). The descriptors that used were the physiochemical descriptors, the structural Molecular Access System (MACCS) descriptors and the Partial equalisation of orbital electronegativity – van der Walls surface areas (Peoe-VSA) descriptors. The AD of the models was evaluated with four distance to model metrics, which were the: kNN with Euclidean distance, kNN with Manhattan distance, Leverage and Mahalanobis distance. The ability of an existing Evotec Caco-2 permeability model to assess literature compounds (extracted from ChEMBL) was evaluated. The literature test set was predicted with a higher RMSE compared to the RMSE in prediction for internal compounds. Additionally, a number of literature compounds was found to be outside the AD of the Evotec model, thus highlighting an area of improvement for proprietary Evotec models. Furthermore, the effect of the inclusion of literature data in the existing Caco-2 permeability and LogD7.4 Evotec proprietary models was evaluated. The RF algorithm was the highest performing method for the development of Caco-2 permeability models and the SVR for the LogD7.4 models. In addition, the leverage method proved to be the most appropriate for the evaluation of the models’ AD. The permeability model built merging literature and proprietary data (Evotec+ChEMBL model) predicted a literature temporal test set with an RMSE of 0.68 while the Evotec model showed an RMSE of 0.74. Even in the case of the Evotec temporal test set, the two models performed similarly and the AD of the mixed models (incorporating both literature and proprietary data) was enlarged. The 86.15% of the compounds in the proprietary temporal test set were within the AD of the Evotec+ChEMBL model, while 76.50% of the compounds of the same test set appeared to be within the AD of the Evotec model. Similarly, the LogD7.4 Evotec+ChEMBL model predicted a literature temporal test set with an RMSE of 0.77 while the Evotec model showed an RMSE of 0.83. Even in the case of the Evotec temporal test set, the two models performed similarly but the AD of the mixed models (incorporating both literature and proprietary data) was enlarged. The 94.86% of the compounds in the proprietary temporal test set were within the AD of the Evotec+ChEMBL model, while 88.49% of the compounds of the same test set appeared to be within the AD of the Evotec model. This study demonstrated that the inclusion of public ADME data into proprietary models improved the performance of proprietary models and enlarged at the same time their AD. The methodology presented herein will be applied by Evotec computational scientists to re-build the Caco-2 and LogD7.4 Evotec proprietary models considering literature data as discussed in this thesis

定量的構造物性相関/定量的構造活性相関モデルの逆解析を利用した化学構造創出に関する研究

学位の種別: 課程博士審査委員会委員 : （主査）東京大学教授 船津 公人, 東京大学教授 酒井 康行, 東京大学准教授 杉山 弘和, 東京大学准教授 伊藤 大知, 京都大学特任教授 奧野 恭史, スイス連邦工科大学教授 Gisbert SchneiderUniversity of Tokyo(東京大学

Machine Learning for Modelling Tissue Distribution of Drugs and the Impact of Transporters

The ability to predict human pharmacokinetics in early stages of drug development is of paramount importance to prevent late stage attrition as well as in managing toxicity. This thesis explores the machine learning modelling of one of the main pharmacokinetics parameters that determines the therapeutic success of a drug - volume of distribution. In order to do so, a variety of physiological phenomena with known mechanisms of impact on drug distribution were considered as input features during the modelling of volume of distribution namely, Solute Carriers-mediated uptake and ATP-binding Cassette-mediated efflux, drug-induced phospholipidosis and plasma protein binding. These were paired with molecular descriptors to provide both chemical and biological information to the building of the predictive models. Since biological data used as input is limited, prior to modelling volume of distribution, the various types of physiological descriptors were also modelled. Here, a focus was placed on harnessing the information contained in correlations within the two transporter families, which was done by using multi-label classification. The application of such approach to transporter data is very recent and its use to model Solute Carriers data, for example, is reported here for the first time. On both transporter families, there was evidence that accounting for correlations between transporters offers useful information that is not portrayed by molecular descriptors. This effort also allowed uncovering new potential links between members of the Solute Carriers family, which are not obvious from a purely physiological standpoint. The models created for the different physiological parameters were then used to predict these parameters and fill in the gaps in the available experimental data, and the resulting merging of experimental and predicted data was used to model volume of distribution. This exercise improved the accuracy of volume of distribution models, and the generated models incorporated a wide variety of the different physiological descriptors supplied along with molecular features. The use of most of these physiological descriptors in the modelling of distribution is unprecedented, which is one of the main novelty points of this thesis. Additionally, as a parallel complementary work, a new method to characterize the predictive reliability of machine learning classification model was proposed, and an in depth analysis of mispredictions, their trends and causes was carried out, using one of the transporter models as example. This is an important complement to the main body of work in this thesis, as predictive performance is necessarily tied to prediction reliability