Predicting intrinsic clearance using deep learning-based drug-metabolic enzyme interaction features on an...

Intrinsic clearance is a key pharmacokinetic parameter in drug development because it influences systemic exposure and dose selection. Conventional in vitro-in vivo extrapolation (IVIVE) approaches are useful but often require additional experimental resources and may be difficult to apply in the earliest stages of compound screening. This study aimed to develop a biologically informed computational framework for intrinsic clearance prediction by integrating drug-target interaction (DTI)-derived features from 23 hepatic metabolic proteins with physicochemical properties, using an IVIVE-based endpoint harmonization approach to unify heterogeneous endpoint labels.

A multi-source human clearance dataset was assembled and harmonized into a common intrinsic clearance endpoint. A pretrained DTI model based on ChemBERTa and ProtBERT was used to generate precomputed interaction features for CYP, UGT, and SULT family proteins. These features were combined with compound structure and physicochemical descriptors in downstream clearance prediction models using either a multilayer perceptron (MLP) or a transformer encoder. Internal evaluation included repeated random 5-fold cross-validation and scaffold-split analysis, and an independent external evaluation set of 185 compounds was additionally examined.

Feature settings incorporating DTI-derived information showed improved regression performance compared with the descriptor-only baseline across most evaluated metrics. Under the augmented setting, the MLP model with DTI + LogP/Fup showed the highest overall regression performance among the evaluated models (r²_m = 0.2505 ± 0.0792, r² = 0.2364 ± 0.0879), while the highest CI was observed in the transformer encoder model with DTI + LogP/Fup (0.6915 ± 0.0144). On the external evaluation set, the MLP model showed an AFE of 1.116, with 52.970% and 70.792% of predictions falling within 2-fold and 3-fold error, respectively. Comparisons with published IVIVE-related studies should be interpreted as contextual rather than direct head-to-head validation.

The proposed framework supports intrinsic clearance estimation by combining biologically informed DTI-derived features with physicochemical information in an interpretable prediction setting. Although the predictive performance remains modest, the results suggest potential utility as a supportive early-stage prioritization tool when standardized experimental clearance data are limited. Further work is needed to expand the dataset, strengthen external validation with independent cohorts, and incorporate additional elimination pathways such as renal clearance and transporter-mediated disposition.