Quantitative Polypharmacology Profiling Based on a Multifingerprint Similarity Predictive Approach

We present a new quantitative ligand-based bioactivity prediction approach employing a multifingerprint similarity search algorithm, enabling the polypharmacological profiling of small molecules. Quantitative bioactivity predictions are made on the basis of the statistical distributions of multiple Tanimoto similarity θ values, calculated through 13 different molecular fingerprints, and of the variation of the measured biological activity, reported as ΔpIC50, for all of the ligands sharing a given protein drug target. The application data set comprises as much as 4241 protein drug targets as well as 418 485 ligands selected from ChEMBL (release 25) by employing a set of well-defined filtering rules. Several large internal and external validation studies were carried out to demonstrate the robustness and the predictive potential of the herein proposed method. Additional comparative studies, carried out on two freely available and well-known ligand-target prediction platforms, demonstrated the reliability of our proposed approach for accurate ligand-target matching. Moreover, two applicative cases were also discussed to practically describe how to use our predictive algorithm, which is freely available as a user-friendly web platform. The user can screen single or multiple queries at a time and retrieve the output as a terse html table or as a json file including all of the information concerning the explored similarities to obtain a deeper understanding of the results. High-throughput virtual reverse screening campaigns, allowing for a given query compound the quick detection of the potential drug target from a large collection of them, can be carried out in batch on demand.