Drugs and Drug-Like Compounds: Discriminating Approved Pharmaceuticals from Screening-Library Compounds

Compounds in drug screening-libraries should resemble pharmaceuticals. To operationally test this, we analysed the compounds in terms of known drug-like filters and developed a novel machine learning method to discriminate approved pharmaceuticals from "drug-like" compounds. This method uses both structural features and molecular properties for discrimination. The method has an estimated accuracy of 91% in discriminating between the Maybridge HitFinder library and approved pharmaceuticals, and 99% between the NATDiverse collection (from Analyticon Discovery) and approved pharmaceuticals. These results show that Lipinski's Rule of 5 for oral absorption is not sufficient to describe "drug-likeness" and be the main basis of screening-library design.