Predicting Skin Permeability by means of Computational Approaches : Reliability and Caveats in Pharmaceutical Studies

© 2019 American Chemical Society.The skin is the main barrier between the internal body environment and the external one. The characteristics of this barrier and its properties are able to modify and affect drug delivery and chemical toxicity parameters. Therefore, it is not surprising that permeability of many different compounds has been measured through several in vitro and in vivo techniques. Moreover, many different in silico approaches have been used to identify the correlation between the structure of the permeants and their permeability, to reproduce the skin behavior, and to predict the ability of specific chemicals to permeate this barrier. A significant number of issues, like interlaboratory variability, experimental conditions, data set building rationales, and skin site of origin and hydration, still prevent us from obtaining a definitive predictive skin permeability model. This review wants to show the main advances and the principal approaches in computational methods used to predict this property, to enlighten the main issues that have arisen, and to address the challenges to develop in future research.Peer reviewedFinal Accepted Versio

In Silico Prediction of Physicochemical Properties

This report provides a critical review of computational models, and in particular(quantitative) structure-property relationship (QSPR) models, that are available for the prediction of physicochemical properties. The emphasis of the review is on the usefulness of the models for the regulatory assessment of chemicals, particularly for the purposes of the new European legislation for the Registration, Evaluation, Authorisation and Restriction of CHemicals (REACH), which entered into force in the European Union (EU) on 1 June 2007. It is estimated that some 30,000 chemicals will need to be further assessed under REACH. Clearly, the cost of determining the toxicological and ecotoxicological effects, the distribution and fate of 30,000 chemicals would be enormous. However, the legislation makes it clear that testing need not be carried out if adequate data can be obtained through information exchange between manufacturers, from in vitro testing, and from in silico predictions. The effects of a chemical on a living organism or on its distribution in the environment is controlled by the physicochemical properties of the chemical. Important physicochemical properties in this respect are, for example, partition coefficient, aqueous solubility, vapour pressure and dissociation constant. Whilst all of these properties can be measured, it is much quicker and cheaper, and in many cases just as accurate, to calculate them by using dedicated software packages or by using (QSPRs). These in silico approaches are critically reviewed in this report.JRC.I.3-Toxicology and chemical substance

An adaptive model for learning molecular endpoints

I will describe a recursive neural network that deals with undirected graphs, and its application to predicting property labels or activity values of small molecules. The model is entirely general, in that it can process any undirected graph with a finite number of nodes by factorising it into a number of directed graphs with the same skeleton. The model\u27s only input in the applications I will present is the graph representing the chemical structure of the molecule. In spite of its simplicity, the model outperforms or matches the state of the art in three of the four tasks, and in the fourth is outperformed only by a method resorting to a very problem-specific feature

Machine Learning, Quantum Mechanics, and Chemical Compound Space

We review recent studies dealing with the generation of machine learning models of molecular and solid properties. The models are trained and validated using standard quantum chemistry results obtained for organic molecules and materials selected from chemical space at random

Greedy and linear ensembles of machine learning methods outperform single approaches for QSPR regression problems

The application of Machine Learning to cheminformatics is a large and active field of research, but there exist few papers which discuss whether ensembles of different Machine Learning methods can improve upon the performance of their component methodologies. Here we investigated a variety of methods, including kernel-based, tree, linear, neural networks, and both greedy and linear ensemble methods. These were all tested against a standardised methodology for regression with data relevant to the pharmaceutical development process. Thinvestigation focused on QSPR problems within drug-like chemical space. We aimed to investigate which methods perform best, and how the ‘wisdom of crowds’ principle can be applied to ensemble predictors. It was found that no single method performs best for all problems, but that a dynamic, well-structured ensemble predictor would perform very well across the board, usually providing an improvement in performance over the best single method. Its use of weighting factors allows the greedy ensemble to acquire a bigger contribution from the better performing models, and this helps the greedy ensemble generally to outperform the simpler linear ensemble. Choice of data pre-processing methodology was found to be crucial to performance of each method too.PostprintPeer reviewe