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Revealing cytotoxic substructures in molecules using deep learning

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Item Type:Article
Title:Revealing cytotoxic substructures in molecules using deep learning
Creators Name:Webel, H.E. and Kimber, T.B. and Radetzki, S. and Neuenschwander, M. and Nazaré, M. and Volkamer, A.
Abstract:In drug development, late stage toxicity issues of a compound are the main cause of failure in clinical trials. In silico methods are therefore of high importance to guide the early design process to reduce time, costs and animal testing. Technical advances and the ever growing amount of available toxicity data enabled machine learning, especially neural networks, to impact the field of predictive toxicology. In this study, cytotoxicity prediction, one of the earliest handles in drug discovery, is investigated using a deep learning approach trained on a highly consistent in-house data set of over 34,000 compounds with a share of less than 5% of cytotoxic molecules. The model reached a balanced accuracy of over 70%, similar to previously reported studies using Random Forest. Albeit yielding good results, neural networks are often described as a black box lacking deeper mechanistic understanding of the underlying model. To overcome this absence of interpretability, a Deep Taylor Decomposition method is investigated to identify substructures that may be responsible for the cytotoxic effects, the so-called toxicophores. Furthermore, this study introduces cytotoxicity maps which provide a visual structural interpretation of the relevance of these substructures. Using this approach could be helpful in drug development to predict the potential toxicity of a compound as well as to generate new insights into the toxic mechanism. Moreover, it could also help to de-risk and optimize compounds.
Keywords:Deep Neural Networks, Deep Taylor Decomposition, Cytotoxic Substructures, Toxicophores
Source:Journal of Computer-Aided Molecular Design
ISSN:0920-654X
Publisher:Springer
Volume:34
Number:7
Page Range:731-746
Date:July 2020
Official Publication:https://doi.org/10.1007/s10822-020-00310-4
PubMed:View item in PubMed

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