A quantitative study of cytotoxic compounds using graph based descriptors and machine learning
摘要
Cytotoxic drugs form a heterogeneous group of antineoplastic agents commonly employed in the management of cancer and other disorders but are commonly linked with limited therapeutic indices and severe side effects. It is important to learn their physicochemical properties thus making a prediction of absorption, permeability and distribution. One of such properties is the Topological Polar Surface Area (Top_PSA), an important property of membrane transport and a popular surrogate of passive diffusion and blood brain barrier permeability. We also explored in this study whether graph-theoretrical and molecular descriptors could be a consistent predictor of RDKit/Mordred-calculated Top_PSA values of a curated dataset of 156 structure-diverse cytotoxic agents. Fifty eight descriptors were calculated and preprocessed in five pre-processing schemes such as direct fitting, PCA, robust scaling, identification and elimination of outliers, and feature selection based on the VIF by using linear, LASSO and ridge regression model. K-fold cross-validation was strictly applied to all the models. The best predictive performance of robust scaling with LASSO was the largest