Novel Methods for Prioritizing "Close-In" Analogs from Structure-Activity Relationship Matrices

Here we describe the development of novel methods for compound evaluation and prioritization based on the structure-activity relationship matrix (SARM) framework. The SARM data structure allows automatic and exhaustive extraction of SAR patterns from data sets and their organization into a chemically intuitive scaffold/functional-group format. While SARMs have been used in the retrospective analysis of SAR discontinuity and identifying underexplored regions of chemistry space, there have been only a few attempts to apply SARMs prospectively in the prioritization of "close-in" analogs. In this work, three new ways of prioritizing virtual compounds based on SARMs are described: (1) matrix pattern-based prioritization, (2) similarity weighted, matrix pattern-based prioritization, and (3) analysis of variance based prioritization (ANV). All of these methods yielded high predictive power for six benchmark data sets (prediction accuracy R² range from 0.63 to 0.82), yielding confidence in their application to new design ideas. In particular, the ANV method outperformed the previously reported SARM based method for five out of the six data sets tested. The impact of various SARM parameters were investigated and the reasons why SARM-based compound prioritization methods provide higher predictive power are discussed.