Applications of Support Vector Machines as a Robust tool in High Throughput Virtual Screening

Chemical space is enormously huge but not all of it is pertinent for the drug designing. Virtual screening methods act as knowledge-based filters to discover the coveted novel lead molecules possessing desired pharmacological properties. Support Vector Machines (SVM) is a reliable virtual screening tool for prioritizing molecules with the required biological activity and minimum toxicity. It has to its credit inherent advantages such as support for noisy data mainly coming from varied high-throughput biological assays, high sensitivity, specificity, prediction accuracy and reduction in false positives. SVM-based classification methods can efficiently discriminate inhibitors from non-inhibitors, actives from inactives, toxic from non-toxic and promiscuous from non-promiscuous molecules. As the principles of drug design are also applicable for agrochemicals, SVM methods are being applied for virtual screening for pesticides too. The current review discusses the basic kernels and models used for binary discrimination and also features used for developing SVM-based scoring functions, which will enhance our understanding of molecular interactions. SVM modeling has also been compared by many researchers with other statistical methods such as Artificial Neural Networks, k-nearest neighbour (kNN), decision trees, partial least squares, etc. Such studies have also been discussed in this review. Moreover, a case study involving the use of SVM method for screening molecules for cancer therapy has been carried out and the preliminary results presented here indicate that the SVM is an excellent classifier for screening the molecules

High performance computational virtual screening tools: development and application to the discovery of kinase inhibitors

Ph.DDOCTOR OF PHILOSOPH

Effect of Binding Pose and Modeled Structures on SVMGen and GlideScore Enrichment of Chemical Libraries

Virtual screening consists of docking libraries of small molecules to a target protein followed by rank-ordering of the resulting structures using scoring functions. The ability of scoring methods to distinguish between actives and inactives depends on several factors that include the accuracy of the binding pose during the docking step and the quality of the three-dimensional structure of the target. Here, we build on our previous work to introduce a new scoring approach (SVMGen) that uses machine learning trained with features from statistical pair potentials obtained from three-dimensional crystal structures. We use SVMGen and GlideScore to explore how enrichment or rank-ordering is affected by binding pose accuracy. To that end, we create a validation set that consists strictly of proteins whose crystal structure was solved in complex with their inhibitors. For the rank-ordering studies, we use crystal structures from PDBbind along with corresponding binding affinity data provided in the database. In addition to binding pose, we investigate the effect of using modeled structures for the target on the enrichment performance of SVMGen and GlideScore. To accomplish this, we generated homology models for protein kinases in DUD-E for which crystal structures are available to enable comparison of enrichment between modeled and crystal structure. We also generate homology models for kinases in SARfari for which there are many known small-molecule inhibitors but no known crystal structure. These models are used to assess the ability of SVMGen and GlideScore to distinguish between actives and decoys. We focus our work on protein kinases considering the wealth of structural and binding affinity data that exists for this family of proteins

Virtual Screening of Multi-Target Agents by Combinatorial Machine Learning Methods

Ph.DDOCTOR OF PHILOSOPH

Methods to Improve Virtual Screening of Potential Drug Leads for Specific Pharmacodynamic and Toxicological Properties

Ph.DDOCTOR OF PHILOSOPH

Drug discovery and computational strategies in the multitarget drugs era

The pharmaceutical industry is increasingly joining chemoinformatics in the search for the development of new drugs to be used in the treatment of diseases. These computational studies have the advantage of being less expensive and optimize the study time, and thus the interest in this area is increasing. Among the techniques used is the development of multitarget directed ligands (MTDLs), which has become an ascending technique, mainly due to the improvement in the quality of treatment involving several drugs. Multitarget therapy is more effective than traditional drug therapy that emphasizes maximum selectivity for a single target. In this review a multitarget drug survey was carried out as a promising strategy in several important diseases: neglected diseases, neurodegenerative diseases, AIDS, and cancer. In addition, we discuss Computer-Aided Drug Design (CADD) techniques as a tool in the projection of multitarget compounds against these diseases

Development Of Database And Computational Methods For Disease Detection And Drug Discovery

Ph.DDOCTOR OF PHILOSOPH

Multi-target selection and high throughput quantitative structure-activity relationship model development

Ph.DDOCTOR OF PHILOSOPH

In silico approach to screen compounds active against parasitic nematodes of major socio-economic importance

Infections due to parasitic nematodes are common causes of morbidity and fatality around the world especially in developing nations. At present however, there are only three major classes of drugs for treating human nematode infections. Additionally the scientific knowledge on the mechanism of action and the reason for the resistance to these drugs is poorly understood. Commercial incentives to design drugs that are endemic to developing countries are limited therefore, virtual screening in academic settings can play a vital role is discovering novel drugs useful against neglected diseases. In this study we propose to build robust machine learning model to classify and screen compounds active against parasitic nematodes.A set of compounds active against parasitic nematodes were collated from various literature sources including PubChem while the inactive set was derived from DrugBank database. The support vector machine (SVM) algorithm was used for model development, and stratified ten-fold cross validation was used to evaluate the performance of each classifier. The best results were obtained using the radial basis function kernel. The SVM method achieved an accuracy of 81.79% on an independent test set. Using the model developed above, we were able to indentify novel compounds with potential anthelmintic activity.In this study, we successfully present the SVM approach for predicting compounds active against parasitic nematodes which suggests the effectiveness of computational approaches for antiparasitic drug discovery. Although, the accuracy obtained is lower than the previously reported in a similar study but we believe that our model is more robust because we intentionally employed stringent criteria to select inactive dataset thus making it difficult for the model to classify compounds. The method presents an alternative approach to the existing traditional methods and may be useful for predicting hitherto novel anthelmintic compounds.12 page(s