Quantitative structure-activity antimalarial relationships have been studied for 63 analogues of 2-aziridinyl and 2,3-bis(aziridinyl)-1,4-naphthoquinonyl sulfonate and acylate derivatives by means of multiple linear regression (MLR) and artificial neural networks (ANN). The antimalarial activity [-log(IC50x10(6))] of the compounds studied were well correlated with descriptors encoding the chemical structure. Using the pertinent descriptors revealed by a stepwise procedure in the multiple linear regression technique, a correlation coefficient of 0.9394 (s=0.2121) for the training set was obtained for the ANN model in a [3-5-1] configuration. The results show that the antimalarial activity of 2-aziridinyl and 2,3-bis(aziridinyl)-1,4-naphthoquinonyl sulfonate and acylate derivatives is strongly dependent on hydrophobic character, hydrogen-bond acceptors and also steric factors of the substituents.

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Artificial neural networks (ANNs) can be utilized to generate predictive models of quantitative structure-activity relationships (QSAR) between a set of molecular descriptors and activity. In the present work, QSAR analysis for a set of 95 1-[(2-hydroxyethoxy)-methyl]-6-(phenylthio)thymine (HEPT) derivatives has been investigated by means of a three-layered neural network (NN). It has been shown that NN can be a potential tool in the investigation of QSAR analysis compared with the models given in the literature. The results obtained by using the NN adopted for QSAR models showing not only good statistical significance in fitting, but also high predictive ability. (0.916< r <0.968 and q 2 = 0.8779). The relevant factors controlling the anti-HIV-1 activity of HEPT derivatives have been identified. The results are along the same lines as those of our previous studies on HEPT derivatives and indicate the importance of the hydrophobic parameter in modelling the QSAR for HEPT derivatives