Multiclass Classifier for P-Glycoprotein Substrates, Inhibitors, and Non-Active Compounds

P-glycoprotein (P-gp) is a transmembrane protein that actively transports a wide variety of chemically diverse compounds out of the cell. It is highly associated with the ADMET (absorption, distribution, metabolism, excretion and toxicity) properties of drugs/drug candidates and contributes to decreasing toxicity by eliminating compounds from cells, thereby preventing intracellular accumulation. Therefore, in the drug discovery and toxicological assessment process it is advisable to pay attention to whether a compound under development could be transported by P-gp or not. In this study, an in silico multiclass classification model capable of predicting the probability of a compound to interact with P-gp was developed using a counter-propagation artificial neural network (CP ANN) based on a set of 2D molecular descriptors, as well as an extensive dataset of 2512 compounds (1178 P-gp inhibitors, 477 P-gp substrates and 857 P-gp non-active compounds). The model provided a good classification performance, producing non error rate (NER) values of 0.93 for the training set and 0.85 for the test set, while the average precision (AvPr) was 0.93 for the training set and 0.87 for the test set. An external validation set of 385 compounds was used to challenge the model's performance. On the external validation set the NER and AvPr values were 0.70 for both indices. We believe that this in silico classifier could be effectively used as a reliable virtual screening tool for identifying potential P-gp ligands.