Background: Drug-induced liver injury (DILI) is a major safety concern characterized by a complex and diverse pathogenesis. In order to identify DILI early in drug development, a better understanding of the injury and models with better predictivity are urgently needed. One approach in this regard are in silico models which aim at predicting the risk of DILI based on the compound structure. However, these models do yet show sufficient predictive performance or interpretability to be useful for decision making by themselves, the former partially stemming from the underlying problem of labeling the in vivo DILI risk of compounds in a meaningful way for generating machine learning models.
Results: As part of the Critical Assessment of Massive Data Analysis (CAMDA) “CMap Drug Safety Challenge” 2019 (http://papers.camda.info/), chemical structure-based models were generated using the binarized DILIrank annotations. Support Vector Machine (SVM) and Random Forest (RF) classifiers showed comparable performance to previously published models with a mean balanced accuracy over models generated using 5-fold cross-validation inside a 10-fold training scheme of 0.759±0.027 when predicting an external test set. In the models which used predicted protein targets as compound descriptors, we identified the most information-rich proteins which agreed with the mechanisms of action and toxicity of nonsteroidal anti-inflammatory drugs (NSAIDs), one of the most important drug classes causing DILI, and the previously established stress response pathways mediated by mitochondria, p38 MAPK and TP53. In addition, we identified multiple proteins involved in xenobiotic metabolism which could be novel DILI-related off-targets, such as CLK1 and DDR2. Moreover, we derived potential structural alerts for DILI with high precision, including furan and hydrazine derivatives; however, all derived alerts were present in approved drugs and were over specific indicating the need to consider quantitative variables such as dose.
Conclusion: Using chemical structure-based descriptors such as structural fingerprints and predicted protein targets, DILI prediction models were built with a predictive performance comparable to previous literature. In addition, we derived insights on proteins and pathways statistically (and potentially causally) linked to DILI from these models and inferred new structural alerts related to this adverse endpoint.

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Posted 10 Mar, 2020
Received 19 Aug, 2020
On 31 Jul, 2020
On 29 Jul, 2020
Invitations sent on 28 Jul, 2020
On 09 Mar, 2020
On 08 Mar, 2020
On 05 Mar, 2020
On 27 Feb, 2020
Posted 10 Mar, 2020
Received 19 Aug, 2020
On 31 Jul, 2020
On 29 Jul, 2020
Invitations sent on 28 Jul, 2020
On 09 Mar, 2020
On 08 Mar, 2020
On 05 Mar, 2020
On 27 Feb, 2020
Background: Drug-induced liver injury (DILI) is a major safety concern characterized by a complex and diverse pathogenesis. In order to identify DILI early in drug development, a better understanding of the injury and models with better predictivity are urgently needed. One approach in this regard are in silico models which aim at predicting the risk of DILI based on the compound structure. However, these models do yet show sufficient predictive performance or interpretability to be useful for decision making by themselves, the former partially stemming from the underlying problem of labeling the in vivo DILI risk of compounds in a meaningful way for generating machine learning models.
Results: As part of the Critical Assessment of Massive Data Analysis (CAMDA) “CMap Drug Safety Challenge” 2019 (http://papers.camda.info/), chemical structure-based models were generated using the binarized DILIrank annotations. Support Vector Machine (SVM) and Random Forest (RF) classifiers showed comparable performance to previously published models with a mean balanced accuracy over models generated using 5-fold cross-validation inside a 10-fold training scheme of 0.759±0.027 when predicting an external test set. In the models which used predicted protein targets as compound descriptors, we identified the most information-rich proteins which agreed with the mechanisms of action and toxicity of nonsteroidal anti-inflammatory drugs (NSAIDs), one of the most important drug classes causing DILI, and the previously established stress response pathways mediated by mitochondria, p38 MAPK and TP53. In addition, we identified multiple proteins involved in xenobiotic metabolism which could be novel DILI-related off-targets, such as CLK1 and DDR2. Moreover, we derived potential structural alerts for DILI with high precision, including furan and hydrazine derivatives; however, all derived alerts were present in approved drugs and were over specific indicating the need to consider quantitative variables such as dose.
Conclusion: Using chemical structure-based descriptors such as structural fingerprints and predicted protein targets, DILI prediction models were built with a predictive performance comparable to previous literature. In addition, we derived insights on proteins and pathways statistically (and potentially causally) linked to DILI from these models and inferred new structural alerts related to this adverse endpoint.

Figure 1

Figure 2

Figure 3

Figure 4

Figure 5
This is a list of supplementary files associated with this preprint. Click to download.
Loading...