title: Quantifying the chemical beauty of drugs.
abstract: Drug-likeness is a key consideration when selecting compounds during the early stages of drug discovery. However, evaluation of drug-likeness in absolute terms does not reflect adequately the whole spectrum of compound quality. More worryingly, widely used rules may inadvertently foster undesirable molecular property inflation as they permit the encroachment of rule-compliant compounds towards their boundaries. We propose a measure of drug-likeness based on the concept of desirability called the quantitative estimate of drug-likeness (QED). The empirical rationale of QED reflects the underlying distribution of molecular properties. QED is intuitive, transparent, straightforward to implement in many practical settings and allows compounds to be ranked by their relative merit. We extended the utility of QED by applying it to the problem of molecular target druggability assessment by prioritizing a large set of published bioactive compounds. The measure may also capture the abstract notion of aesthetics in medicinal chemistry.
authors.affiliation: Division of Biological Chemistry and Drug Discovery, College of Life Sciences, University of Dundee, Dundee                 DD1 5EH, UK.
authors.forename: G Richard
authors.initials: GR
authors.lastname: Bickerton
authors.forename: Gaia V
authors.initials: GV
authors.lastname: Paolini
authors.forename: Jérémy
authors.initials: J
authors.lastname: Besnard
authors.forename: Sorel
authors.initials: S
authors.lastname: Muresan
authors.forename: Andrew L
authors.initials: AL
authors.lastname: Hopkins
mesh_terms: D036262:Empirical Research; D004364:Pharmaceutical Preparations / Q000737:chemistry*
chemical_list: D004364:Pharmaceutical Preparations