ANN-QSAR model for selection of anticancer leads from structurally heterogeneous series of compounds.

Developing a model for predicting anticancer activity of any classes of organic compounds based on molecular structure is very important goal for medicinal chemist. Different molecular descriptors can be used to solve this problem. Stochastic molecular descriptors so-called the MARCH-INSIDE approach, shown to be very successful in drug design. Nevertheless, the structural diversity of compounds is so vast that we may need non-linear models such as artificial neural networks (ANN) instead of linear ones. SmartMLP-ANN analysis used to model the anticancer activity of organic compounds has shown high average accuracy of 93.79% (train performance) and predictability of 90.88% (validation performance) for the 8:3-MLP topology with different training and predicting series. This ANN model favourably compares with respect to a previous linear discriminant analysis (LDA) model [H. González-Díaz et al., J. Mol. Model 9 (2003) 395] that showed only 80.49% of accuracy and 79.34% of predictability. The present SmartMLP approach employed shorter training times of only 10h while previous models give accuracies of 70-89% only after 25-46 h of training. In order to illustrate the practical use of the model in bioorganic medicinal chemistry, we report the in silico prediction, and in vitro evaluation of six new synthetic tegafur analogues having IC(50) values in a broad range between 37.1 and 138 microgmL(-1) for leukemia (L1210/0) and human T-lymphocyte (Molt4/C8, CEM/0) cells. Theoretical predictions coincide very well with experimental results.