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A scoring scheme for the rapid and automatic classification of molecules into drugs and nondrugs was developed. The method is a valuable new tool that can aid in the selection and prioritization of compounds from large compound collections for purchase or biological testing and that can replace a considerable amount of laborious manual work by a more unbiased approach. It is based on the extraction of knowledge from large databases of drugs and nondrugs. The method was set up by using atom type descriptors for encoding the molecular structures and by training a feedforward neural network for classifying the molecules. It was parametrized and validated by using large databases of drugs and nondrugs (169 331 molecules from the Available Chemicals Directory, ACD, and 38 416 molecules from the World Drug Index, WDI). The method revealed features in the molecular descriptors that either qualify or disqualify a molecule for being a drug and classified 83% of the ACD and 77% of the WDI adequately.

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