Ligand-based virtual screening and biological evaluation of inhibitors of <i>Mycobacterium tuberculosis</i> H37Rv

Novel antimycobacterial compounds are needed to expand the existing toolbox of therapeutic agents, which sometimes fail to be effective. In our study we extracted, filtered, and aggregated the diverse data on antimycobacterial activity of chemical compounds from the ChEMBL database version 24.1. These training sets were used to create the classification and regression models with PASS and GUSAR software. The IOC chemical library consisting of approximately 200,000 chemical compounds was screened using these (Q)SAR models to select novel compounds potentially having antimycobacterial activity. The QikProp tool (Schrödinger) was used to predict ADME properties and find compounds with acceptable ADME profiles. As a result, 20 chemical compounds were selected for further biological evaluation, of which 13 were the Schiff bases of isoniazid. To diversify the set of selected compounds we applied substructure filtering and selected an additional 10 compounds, none of which were Schiff bases of isoniazid. Thirty compounds selected using virtual screening were biologically evaluated in a REMA assay against the M. tuberculosis strain H37Rv. Twelve compounds demonstrated MIC below 20 µM (ranging from 2.17 to 16.67 µM) and 18 compounds demonstrated substantially higher MIC values. The discovered antimycobacterial agents represent different chemical classes.