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Hirte S, Burk O, Tahir A, Schwab M, Windshügel B, Kirchmair J. Development and Experimental Validation of Regularized Machine Learning Models Detecting New, Structurally Distinct Activators of PXR. Cells 2022; 11:cells11081253. [PMID: 35455933 PMCID: PMC9029776 DOI: 10.3390/cells11081253] [Citation(s) in RCA: 1] [Impact Index Per Article: 0.5] [Reference Citation Analysis] [Abstract] [MESH Headings] [Track Full Text] [Download PDF] [Figures] [Journal Information] [Subscribe] [Scholar Register] [Received: 02/28/2022] [Accepted: 03/30/2022] [Indexed: 02/04/2023] Open
Abstract
The pregnane X receptor (PXR) regulates the metabolism of many xenobiotic and endobiotic substances. In consequence, PXR decreases the efficacy of many small-molecule drugs and induces drug-drug interactions. The prediction of PXR activators with theoretical approaches such as machine learning (ML) proves challenging due to the ligand promiscuity of PXR, which is related to its large and flexible binding pocket. In this work we demonstrate, by the example of random forest models and support vector machines, that classifiers generated following classical training procedures often fail to predict PXR activity for compounds that are dissimilar from those in the training set. We present a novel regularization technique that penalizes the gap between a model’s training and validation performance. On a challenging test set, this technique led to improvements in Matthew correlation coefficients (MCCs) by up to 0.21. Using these regularized ML models, we selected 31 compounds that are structurally distinct from known PXR ligands for experimental validation. Twelve of them were confirmed as active in the cellular PXR ligand-binding domain assembly assay and more hits were identified during follow-up studies. Comprehensive analysis of key features of PXR biology conducted for three representative hits confirmed their ability to activate the PXR.
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Affiliation(s)
- Steffen Hirte
- Division of Pharmaceutical Chemistry, Department of Pharmaceutical Sciences, Faculty of Life Sciences, University of Vienna, 1090 Vienna, Austria;
| | - Oliver Burk
- Dr. Margarete Fischer-Bosch-Institute of Clinical Pharmacology, University of Tübingen, 70376 Stuttgart, Germany; (O.B.); (M.S.)
| | - Ammar Tahir
- Division of Pharmacognosy, Department of Pharmaceutical Sciences, Faculty of Life Sciences, University of Vienna, 1090 Vienna, Austria;
| | - Matthias Schwab
- Dr. Margarete Fischer-Bosch-Institute of Clinical Pharmacology, University of Tübingen, 70376 Stuttgart, Germany; (O.B.); (M.S.)
- Departments of Clinical Pharmacology and Biochemistry and Pharmacy, University of Tuebingen, 72074 Tübingen, Germany
- Cluster of Excellence IFIT (EXC 2180) “Image-Guided and Functionally Instructed Tumor Therapies”, University of Tübingen, 72074 Tübingen, Germany
| | - Björn Windshügel
- Fraunhofer Institute for Translational Medicine and Pharmacology ITMP, Discovery Research Screening Port, 22525 Hamburg, Germany;
- Department of Life Sciences and Chemistry, Jacobs University Bremen, 28759 Bremen, Germany
| | - Johannes Kirchmair
- Division of Pharmaceutical Chemistry, Department of Pharmaceutical Sciences, Faculty of Life Sciences, University of Vienna, 1090 Vienna, Austria;
- Correspondence: ; Tel.: +43-1-4277-55104
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Sellami A, Réau M, Montes M, Lagarde N. Review of in silico studies dedicated to the nuclear receptor family: Therapeutic prospects and toxicological concerns. Front Endocrinol (Lausanne) 2022; 13:986016. [PMID: 36176461 PMCID: PMC9513233 DOI: 10.3389/fendo.2022.986016] [Citation(s) in RCA: 0] [Impact Index Per Article: 0] [Reference Citation Analysis] [Abstract] [Key Words] [MESH Headings] [Grants] [Track Full Text] [Download PDF] [Figures] [Journal Information] [Submit a Manuscript] [Subscribe] [Scholar Register] [Received: 07/04/2022] [Accepted: 08/08/2022] [Indexed: 11/13/2022] Open
Abstract
Being in the center of both therapeutic and toxicological concerns, NRs are widely studied for drug discovery application but also to unravel the potential toxicity of environmental compounds such as pesticides, cosmetics or additives. High throughput screening campaigns (HTS) are largely used to detect compounds able to interact with this protein family for both therapeutic and toxicological purposes. These methods lead to a large amount of data requiring the use of computational approaches for a robust and correct analysis and interpretation. The output data can be used to build predictive models to forecast the behavior of new chemicals based on their in vitro activities. This atrticle is a review of the studies published in the last decade and dedicated to NR ligands in silico prediction for both therapeutic and toxicological purposes. Over 100 articles concerning 14 NR subfamilies were carefully read and analyzed in order to retrieve the most commonly used computational methods to develop predictive models, to retrieve the databases deployed in the model building process and to pinpoint some of the limitations they faced.
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