A Fully Computational Model for Predicting Percutaneous Drug Absorption

The prediction of transdermal absorption for arbitrary penetrant structures has several important applications in the pharmaceutical industry. We propose a new data-driven, predictive model for skin permeability coefficients k_p based on an ensemble model using k-nearest-neighbor models and ridge regression. The model was trained and validated with a newly assembled data set containing experimental data and structures for 110 compounds. On the basis of three purely computational descriptors (molecular weight, calculated octanol/water partition coefficient, and solvation free energy), we have developed a model allowing for the reliable, purely computational prediction of skin permeability coefficients. The model is both accurate and robust, as we showed in an extensive validation (correlation coefficient for leave-one-out cross validation:  Q = 0.948, mean standard error:  0.2 for log k_p).