Title

A simple approach discriminating cardio-safe drugs from toxic ones

Authors

Mizied Falah, Taher Nassar and Anwar Rayan^*

Affiliation

QRC-Qasemi Research Center, Al-Qasemi Academic College, P.O.B. 124, Baka El-Garbiah 30100, Israel

Email

a_rayan@qsm.ac.il

Article Type

Hypothesis

Date

received March 20, 2009; revised March 29, 2009; accepted April 05, 2009; published June 13, 2009

Abstract

More than 130 FDA-approved drugs have been identified for now to prolong the QT interval and possibly lead to sudden cardiac death. Due to their toxic effect, some of these drugs have been withdrawn from the pharmaceutical market. In this study, we have formulated few rules to assess the ability to prolong QT interval and thereby discriminate between cardiotoxic and -safe drugs. These rules have clearly determined that cardio-toxic drugs are more likely to obey Lipinski rule of 5 and Oprea lead-like rule. Moreover, the cardio-toxic drugs have been found to have in common values of -0.5 to 6.5 log P, 1-5 nitrogen atoms, up to 4 oxygen atoms, 5-27 hydrophobic atoms, and 15-53 single bonds. Matthews Correlation Coefficient with the value of 0.6 was also attained and nearly 96% of the cardio-toxic drugs were successfully covered. Thus, despite the simplicity of this methodology, we have obtained interesting and informative results. The proposed set of these simple rules could be employed to infer cardio-toxicity or -safety for current and potential drugs. The present study will have important impact on decision making in the fields of drug development, molecule screening in biological assays, and other applications as well.

Keywords

Long QT Syndrome, cardio-toxic drug, prediction model

Citation

Falah et al, Bioinformation 3(9): 389-393 (2009)

Edited by

P. Kangueane

ISSN

0973-2063

Publisher

Biomedical Informatics

License

This is an Open Access article which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly credited. This is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License.