Sulfotransferase‐mediated phase II drug metabolism prediction of substrates and sites using accessibility and reactivity‐based algorithms.

Abstract

Sulphotransferases (SULTs) are a major phase II metabolic enzyme class contributing ~20 % to the Phase II metabolism of FDA‐approved drugs. Ignoring the potential for SULT‐mediated metabolism leaves a strong potential for drug‐drug interactions, often causing late‐stage drug discovery failures or black‐boxed warnings on FDA labels. The existing models use only accessibility descriptors and machine learning (ML) methods for class and site of sulfonation (SOS) predictions for SULT. In this study, a variety of accessibility, reactivity, and hybrid models and algorithms have been developed to make accurate substrate and SOS predictions. Unlike the literature models, reactivity parameters for the aliphatic or aromatic hydroxyl groups (R/Ar−O−H), the Bond Dissociation Energy (BDE) gave accurate models with a True Positive Rate (TPR)=0.84 for SOS predictions. We offer mechanistic insights to explain these novel findings that are not recognized in the literature. The accessibility parameters like the ratio of Chemgauss4 Score (CGS) and Molecular Weight (MW) CGS/MW and distance from cofactor (Dis) were essential for class predictions and showed TPR=0.72. Substrates consistently had lower BDE, Dis, and CGS/MW than non‐substrates. Hybrid models also performed acceptablely for SOS predictions. Using the best models, Algorithms gave an acceptable performance in class prediction: TPR=0.62, False Positive Rate (FPR)=0.24, Balanced accuracy (BA)=0.69, and SOS prediction: TPR=0.98, FPR=0.60, and BA=0.69. A rule‐based method was added to improve the predictive performance, which improved the algorithm TPR, FPR, and BA. Validation using an external dataset of drug‐like compounds gave class prediction: TPR=0.67, FPR=0.00, and SOS prediction: TPR=0.80 and FPR=0.44 for the best Algorithm. Comparisons with standard ML models also show that our algorithm shows higher predictive performance for classification on external datasets. Overall, these models and algorithms (SOS predictor) give accurate substrate class and site (SOS) predictions for SULT‐mediated Phase II metabolism and will be valuable to the drug discovery community in academia and industry. The SOS predictor is freely available for academic/non‐profit research via the GitHub link.