Pharmacophore-similarity-based QSAR (PS-QSAR) for group-specific biological activity predictions

Recent technological breakthroughs in medicinal chemistry arena had ameliorated the perspectives of quantitative structure–activity relationship (QSAR) methods. In this direction, we developed a group-based QSAR method based on pharmacophore-similarity concept which takes into account the 2D topological pharmacophoric descriptors and predicts the group-specific biological activities. This activity prediction may assist the contribution of certain pharmacophore features encoded by respective fragments toward activity improvement and/or detrimental effects. We termed this method as pharmacophore-similarity-based QSAR (PS-QSAR) and studied the activity contribution of fragments from 3-hydroxypyridinones derivatives possessing antimalarial activities.