QSAR Studies on the COX‐2 Inhibition by 3,4‐Diarylcycloxazolones Based on MEDV Descriptor

Selective inhibition of cyclooxygenase-2 (COX-2) might avoid the side effects of current available nonsteroidal antiinflammatory drugs while retaining their therapeutic efficacy. A novel variable selection and modeling method based on prediction is developed to construct the quantitative structure-activity relationships (QSAR) between the molecular electronegativity distance vector (MEDV) based on 13 atomic types and the biological activities of a set of selective cyclooxygenase-2 inhibitory molecules, 3,4-diarylcycloxazolones (DAA) plus indomethacin, naproxen, and celecoxib. Using multiple linear regression, a 5-variable linear model is developed with the calibrated correlation coefficient of 0.9271 and root mean square error of 0.17 in modeling stage and the validated correlation coefficient of 0.9030 and root mean square error of 0.20 in leave-one-out validation step, respectively. To further test the predictive ability of the model, 20 DAA compounds are picked up to construct a training set which is used to build a QSAR model and then the model is employed to predict the biological activities of the balance compounds. The predicted correlation coefficient and root mean square error are 0.9332 and 0.19, respectively.