Assessment of a rule-based virtual screening technology (INDDEx) on a benchmark data set.

The Investigational Novel Drug Discovery by Example (INDDEx) package has been developed to find active compounds by linking activity to chemical substructure and to guide the process of further drug development. INDDEx is a machine-learning technique, based on forming qualitative logical rules about substructural features of active molecules, weighting the rules to form a quantitative model, and then using the model to screen a molecular database. INDDEx is shown to be able to learn from multiple active compounds and to be useful for scaffold-hopping when performing virtual screening, giving high retrieval rates even when learning from a small number of compounds. Across the data sets tested, at 1% of the data, INDDEx was found to have average enrichment factors of 69.2, 82.7, and 90.4 when learning from 2, 4, and 8 active ligands, respectively. At 0.1% of the data, INDDEx had average enrichment factors of 492, 631, and 707 when learning from 2, 4, and 8 active ligands, respectively. Excluding all ligands with more than 0.5 Tanimoto Maximum Common Substructure, INDDEx had average enrichment factors at 1% of 52.3, 63.6, and 66.9 when learning from 2, 4, and 8 active ligands, respectively. The performance of INDDEx is compared with that of eHiTS LASSO, PharmaGist, and DOCK.