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The Human Immunodeficiency Virus (HIV) infection is a global pandemic that has claimed 33 million lives to date. One of the most efficacious treatment for naive or pre-treated HIV patients is with the HIV integrase strand transfer inhibitors (INSTIs). However, given that HIV treatment is life-long, the emergence of HIV-1 strains resistant to INSTIs is an imminent challenge. In this work, we showed two best regression QSAR models that were constructed using a boosted Random Forest algorithm [r2 = 0.998, q2(10CV) = 0.721, q2(external_test) = 0.754] and a boosted K* algorithm [r2 = 0.987, q2(10CV) = 0.721, q2(external_test) = 0.758] to predict the pIC50 values of INSTIs. Subsequently, the regression QSAR models were deployed against the Drugbank database for drug repositioning. The top ranked compounds were further evaluated for their target engagement activity using molecular docking studies and their potential as INSTIs evaluated from our literature search. Our study offers the first example of a large-scale regression QSAR modelling effort for discovering highly active INSTIs to combat HIV infection.

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Clathrin-mediated endocytosis (CME) is a normal biological process where cellular contents are transported into the cells. However, this process is often hijacked by different viruses to enter host cells and cause infections. Recently, two proteins that regulate CME – AAK1 and GAK – have been proposed as potential therapeutic targets for designing broad-spectrum antiviral drugs. In this work, we curated two compound datasets containing 83 AAK1 inhibitors and 196 GAK inhibitors each. Subsequently, machine learning methods, namely Random Forest, Elastic Net and Sequential Minimal Optimization, were used to construct Quantitative Structure Activity Relationship (QSAR) models to predict small molecule inhibitors of AAK1 and GAK. To ensure predictivity, these models were evaluated by using Leave-One-Out (LOO) cross validation and with an external test set. In all cases, our QSAR models achieved a q2LOO in range of 0.64 to 0.84 (Root Mean Squared Error; RMSE = 0.41 to 0.52) and a q2ext in range of 0.57 to 0.92 (RMSE = 0.36 to 0.61). Besides, our QSAR models were evaluated by using additional QSAR performance metrics and y-randomization test. Finally, by using a concensus scoring approach, nine chemical compounds from the Drugbank compound library were predicted as AAK1/GAK dual-target inhibitors. The electrostatic potential maps for the nine compounds were generated and compared against two known dual-target inhibitors, sunitinib and baricitinib. Our work provides the rationale to validate these nine compounds experimentally against the protein targets AAK1 and GAK.

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