Computer-Aided Estimation of Biological Activity Profiles of Drug-Like Compounds Taking into Account Their Metabolism in Human Body

Int J Mol Sci. 2020 Oct 11;21(20):7492. doi: 10.3390/ijms21207492.

Abstract

Most pharmaceutical substances interact with several or even many molecular targets in the organism, determining the complex profiles of their biological activity. Moreover, due to biotransformation in the human body, they form one or several metabolites with different biological activity profiles. Therefore, the development and rational use of novel drugs requires the analysis of their biological activity profiles, taking into account metabolism in the human body. In silico methods are currently widely used for estimating new drug-like compounds' interactions with pharmacological targets and predicting their metabolic transformations. In this study, we consider the estimation of the biological activity profiles of organic compounds, taking into account the action of both the parent molecule and its metabolites in the human body. We used an external dataset that consists of 864 parent compounds with known metabolites. It is shown that the complex assessment of active pharmaceutical ingredients' interactions with the human organism increases the quality of computer-aided estimates. The toxic and adverse effects showed the most significant difference: reaching 0.16 for recall and 0.14 for precision.

Keywords: biological activity profiles; computer-aided predictions; drug-like compounds; metabolism.

MeSH terms

  • Computer Simulation
  • Computer-Aided Design*
  • Drug Design*
  • Drug Discovery / methods*
  • Humans
  • Reproducibility of Results
  • Software
  • Structure-Activity Relationship