Design and development of novel therapeutics for coronary heart disease treatment based on cholesteryl ester transfer protein inhibition – in silico approach

Abstract

Cholesteryl ester transfer protein (CETP) belongs to the group of enzymes which inhibition have the application in the treatment of cardiovascular diseases. This study presents QSAR modeling for a set of compounds acting as CETP inhibitors based on the Monte Carlo optimization with SMILES notation and molecular graph-based descriptors, and field-based 3D modeling. A 3D QSAR model was developed for one random split into the training and test sets, whereas conformation independent QSAR models were developed for three random splits, with the results suggesting there is an excellent correlation between them. Various statistical approaches were used to assess the statistical quality of the developed models, including robustness and predictability, and the obtained results were very good. This study used a novel statistical metric known as the index of ideality of correlation for the final assessment of the model, and the results that were obtained suggested that the model was good. Also, molecular fragments which account for the increases and/or decreases of a studied activity were defined and then used for the computer-aided design of new compounds as potential CETP inhibitors. The final assessment of the developed QSAR model and designed inhibitors was done using molecular docking, which revealed an excellent correlation with the results from QSAR modeling.

Communicated by Ramaswamy H. Sarma

Keywords:

• Cholesteryl ester transfer protein inhibitors
• coronary heart disease therapy
• QSAR
• molecular modeling
• drug design

Data availability

The authors confirm that the data supporting the findings of this study are available within the article and its supplementary materials.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Additional information

Funding

This work is based upon work from COST Action CA15135 and supported by the Ministry of Education and Science, the Republic of Serbia, under Project Number 43012.