Predicting Biochemical Interactions – Human P450 2D6 Enzyme Inhibition

In silico screening of chemical libraries or virtual chemicals may reduce drug discovery and medicine optimisation lead times and increase the probability of success by directing search through chemical space. About a dozen intelligent pharmaceutical QSAR modelling techniques were used to predict IC50 concentration (three classes) of drug interaction with a cell wall enzyme (P450 CYC2D6). Genetic programming gave comprehensible cheminformatics models which generalised best. This was shown by a blind test on GlaxoWelcome molecules of machine learning knowledge nuggets mined from SmithKline Beecham compounds. Performance on similar chemicals (interpolation) and diverse chemicals (extrapolation) suggest generalisation is more difficult than avoiding over fitting. Two GP approaches, classification via regression using a multi-objective fitness measure and a direct winner takes all (WTA) or one versus all (OVA) classification, are described. Predictive rules were compressed by separate follow up GP runs seeded with the best program.