Predictive Classification of Clinical Drug Toxicity Using Molecular and Pharmacological Characteristics

Authors

  • Anamika Chauhan Chandigarh University, Punjab

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.69980/wmh06927

Keywords:

Drug Toxicity, Drug-Induced Liver Injury, Predictive Classification, Pharmacological Characteristics, Molecular Descriptors

Abstract

Drug-induced liver injury is still a significant problem in drug development as clinically important toxicity can occur following exposure even when preclinical results are satisfactory. In this study, the predictive classification of clinical drug toxicity was examined using the drug-induced liver injury severity and toxicity (DILIst) dataset from the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA). A dataset of 1,279 distinct drugs that were DILIst-positive or DILIst-negative, along with route-of-administration data, was provided. Descriptive analyses described prevalence of toxicity and patterns of pharmacological routes and chi-square testing assessed the association between categories of routes and toxicity classification. The route-based logistic regression model was tested by stratified 5-fold cross validation and an independent 20% test set. Of 1,279 drugs, 768 (60.0%) were DILIst-positive and 511 (40.0%) were DILIst-negative. Route of administration was reported for 1013 compounds and most were administered orally. A significant difference in the proportion of DILIst-positive compounds was detected between the route categories, but the ability to discriminate with route alone was limited. The analysis confirms the utility of curated clinical toxicity labels, and reveals that pharmacological route data alone is not sufficient to predict toxicity well. For future studies and validation, integration of validated molecular descriptors, structural fingerprints, exposure variables and mechanistic pharmacology is therefore needed to improve and interpret clinical drug-toxicity classification models.

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Published

2026-07-26