PMFF: Development of a Physics-Based Molecular Force Field for Protein Simulation and Ligand Docking.

The physics-based molecular force field (PMFF) was developed by integrating a set of potential energy functions in which each term in an intermolecular potential energy function is derived based on experimental values, such as the dipole moments, lattice energy, proton transfer energy, and X-ray crystal structures. The term "physics-based" is used to emphasize the idea that the experimental observables that are considered to be the most relevant to each term are used for the parameterization rather than parameterizing all observables together against the target value. PMFF uses MM3 intramolecular potential energy terms to describe intramolecular interactions and includes an implicit solvation model specifically developed for the PMFF. We evaluated the PMFF in three ways. We concluded that the PMFF provides reliable information based on the structure in a biological system and interprets the biological phenomena accurately by providing more accurate evidence of the biological phenomena.

Computational classification models for predicting the interaction of compounds with hepatic organic ion importers.

Hepatic transporters, a major determinant of pharmacokinetics, have been used to profile drug properties like efficacy. Among hepatic transporters, importers alter the concentration of the drug by facilitating the transport of a drug into a cell. Despite vast pharmacokinetic studies, the interacting mechanisms of the importers with its substrates or inhibitors are not well understood. Hence, we developed compound binary classification models of whether a compound is binder or nonbinder to a hepatic transporter with experimental data of 284 compounds for four representative hepatic importers, OATP1B1, OATP1B3, OAT2, and OCT1. Support Vector Machine (SVM) along with Genetic Algorithm (GA) was used to construct the classification models of binder versus nonbinder for each target importer. To construct the models, we prepared two data sets, a training data set from Fujitsu database (284 compounds) and an external validation data set from ChEMBL database (1738 compounds). Since an experimental classification criterion between binder and nonbinder has some ambiguity, there is an intrinsic limitation to expect high predictability of the binary classification models developed with the experimental data. The predictability of the classification models calculated with external validation sets were obtained as 77.72%, 84.31%, 84.21%, and 76.38 for OATP1B1, OATP1B3, OAT2, and OCT1, respectively.