Virtual Ligand Screening (VLS) has become an integral part of the drug discovery process for many pharmaceutical companies.
Ligand similarity searches provide a very powerful method of screening large databases of ligands to identify possible hits.
If these hits belong to new chemotypes the method is deemed even more successful. eHiTS LASSO uses a new interacting surface
point types (ISPT) molecular descriptor that is generated from the 3D structure of the ligand, but unlike most 3D descriptors
it is conformation independent. Combined with a neural network machine learning technique, LASSO screens molecular databases
at an ultra fast speed of 1 million structures in under 1 min on a standard PC. The results obtained from eHiTS LASSO trained
on relatively small training sets of just 2, 4 or 8 actives are presented using the diverse directory of useful decoys (DUD)
dataset. It is shown that over a wide range of receptor families, eHiTS LASSO is consistently able to enrich screened databases
and provides scaffold hopping ability.
Keywords Conformation independent QSAR descriptor - Scaffold hopping - Virtual screening - Ligand based screening