QSAR studies on pyrrolidine amides derivatives as DPP-IV inhibitors for type 2 diabetes

Virtual screening of dipeptidyl peptidase-4 inhibitors using quantitative structure-activity relationship-based artificial intelligence and molecular docking of hit compounds

Dipeptidyl peptidase-4 (DPP-4) inhibitors are becoming an essential drug in the treatment of type 2 diabetes mellitus; however, some classes of these drugs exert side effects, including joint pain and pancreatitis. Studies suggest that these side effects might be related to secondary inhibition of DPP-8 and DPP-9. In this study, we identified DPP-4-inhibitor hit compounds selective against DPP-8 and DPP-9. We built a virtual screening workflow using a quantitative structure-activity relationship (QSAR) strategy based on artificial intelligence to allow faster screening of millions of molecules for the DPP-4 target relative to other screening methods. Five regression machine learning algorithms and four classification machine learning algorithms were applied to build virtual screening workflows, with the QSAR model applied using support vector regression (R²_pred 0.78) and the classification QSAR model using the random forest algorithm with 92.2% accuracy. Virtual screening results of > 10 million molecules obtained 2 716 hits compounds with a pIC₅₀ value of > 7.5. Additionally, molecular docking results of several potential hit compounds for DPP-4, DPP-8, and DPP-9 identified CH0002 as showing high inhibitory potential against DPP-4 and low inhibitory potential for DPP-8 and DPP-9 enzymes. These results demonstrated the effectiveness of this technique for identifying DPP-4-inhibitor hit compounds selective for DPP-4 and against DPP-8 and DPP-9 and suggest its potential efficacy for applications to discover hit compounds of other targets.

Application of machine learning methods for the development of antidiabetic drugs

Diabetes is a chronic non-communicable disease caused by several different routes, which has attracted increasing attention. In order to speed up the development of new selective drugs, machine learning (ML) technology has been applied in the process of diabetes drug development, which opens up a new blueprint for drug design. This review provides a comprehensive portrayal of the application of ML in antidiabetic drug use.

Support vector regression-based QSAR models for prediction of antioxidant activity of phenolic compounds

The Support vector regression (SVR) was used to investigate quantitative structure-activity relationships (QSAR) of 75 phenolic compounds with Trolox-equivalent antioxidant capacity (TEAC). Geometric structures were optimized at the EF level of the MOPAC software program. Using Pearson correlation coefficient analysis, four molecular descriptors [n(OH), Cosmo Area (CA), Core-Core Repulsion (CCR) and Final Heat of Formation (FHF)] were selected as independent variables. The QSAR model was developed from the training set consisting of 57 compounds and then used the leave-one-out cross-validation (LOOCV) correlation coefficient to evaluate the prediction ability of the QSAR model. Used Artificial neural network (ANN) and multiple linear regression (MLR) for comparing. The RMSE (root mean square error) values of LOOCV in SVR, ANN and MLR models were 0.44, 0.46 and 0.54. The RMSE values of prediction of external 18 compounds were 0.41, 0.39 and 0.54 for SVR, ANN and MLR models, respectively. The obtained result indicated that the SVR models exhibited excellent predicting performance and competent for predicting the TEAC of phenolic compounds.

Predicting the DPP-IV inhibitory activity pIC₅₀ based on their physicochemical properties

The second development program developed in this work was introduced to obtain physicochemical properties of DPP-IV inhibitors. Based on the computation of molecular descriptors, a two-stage feature selection method called mRMR-BFS (minimum redundancy maximum relevance-backward feature selection) was adopted. Then, the support vector regression (SVR) was used in the establishment of the model to map DPP-IV inhibitors to their corresponding inhibitory activity possible. The squared correlation coefficient for the training set of LOOCV and the test set are 0.815 and 0.884, respectively. An online server for predicting inhibitory activity pIC50 of the DPP-IV inhibitors as described in this paper has been given in the introduction.