DBPP-Predictor: a novel strategy for prediction of chemical drug-likeness based on property profiles

Evaluation of chemical drug-likeness is essential for the discovery of high-quality drug candidates while avoiding unwarranted biological and clinical trial costs. A high-quality drug candidate should have promising drug-like properties, including pharmacological activity, suitable physicochemical and ADMET properties. Hence, in silico prediction of chemical drug-likeness has been proposed while being a challenging task. Although several prediction models have been developed to assess chemical drug-likeness, they have such drawbacks as sample dependence and poor interpretability. In this study, we developed a novel strategy, named DBPP-Predictor, to predict chemical drug-likeness based on property profile representation by integrating physicochemical and ADMET properties. The results demonstrated that DBPP-Predictor exhibited considerable generalization capability with AUC (area under the curve) values from 0.817 to 0.913 on external validation sets. In terms of application feasibility analysis, the results indicated that DBPP-Predictor not only demonstrated consistent and reasonable scoring performance on different data sets, but also was able to guide structural optimization. Moreover, it offered a new drug-likeness assessment perspective, without significant linear correlation with existing methods. We also developed a free standalone software for users to make drug-likeness prediction and property profile visualization for their compounds of interest. In summary, our DBPP-Predictor provided a valuable tool for the prediction of chemical drug-likeness, helping to identify appropriate drug candidates for further development.