Adverse drug reaction prediction using scores produced by large-scale drug-protein target docking on high-performance computing machines

PLoS One. 2014 Sep 5;9(9):e106298. doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0106298. eCollection 2014.

Abstract

Late-stage or post-market identification of adverse drug reactions (ADRs) is a significant public health issue and a source of major economic liability for drug development. Thus, reliable in silico screening of drug candidates for possible ADRs would be advantageous. In this work, we introduce a computational approach that predicts ADRs by combining the results of molecular docking and leverages known ADR information from DrugBank and SIDER. We employed a recently parallelized version of AutoDock Vina (VinaLC) to dock 906 small molecule drugs to a virtual panel of 409 DrugBank protein targets. L1-regularized logistic regression models were trained on the resulting docking scores of a 560 compound subset from the initial 906 compounds to predict 85 side effects, grouped into 10 ADR phenotype groups. Only 21% (87 out of 409) of the drug-protein binding features involve known targets of the drug subset, providing a significant probe of off-target effects. As a control, associations of this drug subset with the 555 annotated targets of these compounds, as reported in DrugBank, were used as features to train a separate group of models. The Vina off-target models and the DrugBank on-target models yielded comparable median area-under-the-receiver-operating-characteristic-curves (AUCs) during 10-fold cross-validation (0.60-0.69 and 0.61-0.74, respectively). Evidence was found in the PubMed literature to support several putative ADR-protein associations identified by our analysis. Among them, several associations between neoplasm-related ADRs and known tumor suppressor and tumor invasiveness marker proteins were found. A dual role for interstitial collagenase in both neoplasms and aneurysm formation was also identified. These associations all involve off-target proteins and could not have been found using available drug/on-target interaction data. This study illustrates a path forward to comprehensive ADR virtual screening that can potentially scale with increasing number of CPUs to tens of thousands of protein targets and millions of potential drug candidates.

Publication types

  • Research Support, U.S. Gov't, Non-P.H.S.

MeSH terms

  • Algorithms
  • Computer Simulation
  • Data Mining
  • Datasets as Topic
  • Drug-Related Side Effects and Adverse Reactions*
  • Humans
  • Molecular Docking Simulation* / methods
  • Pharmaceutical Preparations / chemistry*
  • Pharmaceutical Preparations / metabolism
  • Proteins / chemistry*
  • Proteins / metabolism

Substances

  • Pharmaceutical Preparations
  • Proteins

Grants and funding

Funding was provided by Laboratory Directed Research and Development (LDRD) (004-SI-012). The funders had no role in study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish, or preparation of the manuscript.