A three-tier QSAR modeling strategy for estimating eye irritation potential of diverse chemicals in rabbit for regulatory purposes

Experimental determination of the eye irritation potential (EIP) of chemicals is not only tedious, time and resource intensive, it involves cruelty to test animals. In this study, we have established a three-tier QSAR modeling strategy for estimating the EIP of chemicals for the use of pharmaceutical industry and regulatory agencies. Accordingly, a qualitative (binary classification: irritating, non-irritating), semi-quantitative (four-category classification), and quantitative (regression) QSAR models employing the SDT, DTF, and DTB methods were developed for predicting the EIP of chemicals in accordance with the OECD guidelines. Structural features of chemicals responsible for eye irritation were extracted and used in QSAR analysis. The external predictive power of the developed QSAR models were evaluated through the internal and external validation procedures recommended in QSAR literature. In test data, the two and four category classification QSAR models (DTF, DTB) rendered accuracy of >93%, while the regression QSAR models (DTF, DTB) yielded correlation (R-2) of >0.92 between the measured and predicted EIPs. Values of various statistical validation coefficients derived for the test data were above their respective threshold limits (except r(m)(2) in DTF), thus put a high confidence in this analysis. The applicability domain of the constructed QSAR models were defined using the descriptors range and leverage approaches. The QSAR models in this study performed better than any of the previous studies. The results suggest that the developed QSAR models can reliably predict the EIP of diverse chemicals and can be useful tools for screening of candidate molecules in the drug development process. (C) 2016 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.