Machine Learning-Based Prediction of Drug-Induced Hepatotoxicity: An OvA-QSTR Approach

Drug-induced hepatotoxicity, also known as drug-induced liver injury (DILI), is among the possible adverse effects of pharmacotherapy. This clinical condition is accepted as one of the factors leading to patient mortality and morbidity. The LiverTox database was built by the National Institute of Diabetes and Digestive and Kidney Diseases (NIDDK) to predict potential liver damage from medications and take appropriate precautions. The database has classified medicines into seven risk categories (A, B, C, D, E, E*, and X) to avoid medicine-induced liver toxicity. The hepatic damage risk decreases from group A to group E. This study did not include the E* and X classes because they contained unverified and unknown data groups. Our study aims to predict potential liver damage of new drug molecules without using experimental animals. We predict which of the LiverTox risk category drugs with unknown liver toxicity potential will fall into using our one-vs-all quantitative structure-toxicity relationship (OvA-QSTR) model. Our dataset, consisting of 678 organic drug molecules from different pharmacological classes, was collected from LiverTox. The OvA-QSTR models implemented by Bayesian Network (BayesNet) performed well based on the selected descriptors, with the precision-recall curve (PRC) areas ranging from 0.718 to 0.869. Our OvA-QSTR models provide a reliable premarketing risk evaluation of pharmaceutical-induced liver damage potential and offer predictions for different risk levels in DILI.