Exhaustive SAR analysis tools for HTS hits based on intuition of medicinal chemists

High-throughput screening (HTS) is a common practice in drug discovery. Although the chemoinformatics community has proposed various approaches for HTS data analysis, medicinal chemists continue to long for intuitive tools for the structure-activity relationship (SAR) analysis of HTS hits. Here, the author propose SAR analysis tools that were designed to help medicinal chemists grasp the chemical space of interest with conventional SAR tables. These tools comprise an on-the-fly analysis environment and a series of computational protocols for data processing prior to the interactive analysis. The protocols are designed for the following processes: i) structural classification based on simple rules to mimic visual inspection by medicinal chemists; ii) exhaustive generation of promising SAR tables using Pharmacofragment (PHF), a novel substructure concept; and iii) comprehensive analogue search to identify compounds that correspond to blank cells in SAR tables from compounds at hand. A case study using data from a screen for ribosomal protein S6 phosphorylation inhibitors (PubChem AID:493208) suggests that these tools are useful for generating conventional SAR tables for practical application to large-scale data such as HTS.