Building reliable and robust quantitative structure-property relationship (QSPR) models is a challenging task. First, the experimental data needs to be obtained, analyzed and curated. Second, the number of available methods is continuously growing and evaluating different algorithms and methodologies can be arduous. Finally, the last hurdle that researchers face is to ensure the reproducibility of their models and facilitate their transferability into practice. In this work, we introduce QSPRpred, a toolkit for analysis of bioactivity data sets and QSPR modelling, which attempts to address the aforementioned challenges. QSPRpred's modular Python API enables users to intuitively describe different parts of a modelling workflow using a plethora of pre-implemented components, but also integrates customized implementations in a "plug-and-play" manner. QSPRpred data sets and models are directly serializable, which means they can be readily reproduced and put into operation after training as the models are saved with all required data pre-processing steps to make predictions on new compounds directly from SMILES strings. The general-purpose character of QSPRpred is also demonstrated by inclusion of support for multi-task and proteochemometric modelling. The package is extensively documented and comes with a large collection of tutorials to help new users. In this paper, we describe all of QSPRpred's functionalities and also conduct a small benchmarking case study to illustrate how different components can be leveraged to compare a diverse set of models. QSPRpred is fully open-source and available at https://github.com/CDDLeiden/QSPRpred .Scientific ContributionQSPRpred aims to provide a complex, but comprehensive Python API to conduct all tasks encountered in QSPR modelling from data preparation and analysis to model creation and model deployment. In contrast to similar packages, QSPRpred offers a wider and more exhaustive range of capabilities and integrations with many popular packages that also go beyond QSPR modelling. A significant contribution of QSPRpred is also in its automated and highly standardized serialization scheme, which significantly improves reproducibility and transferability of models.

• Keywords
• Cheminformatics, Machine learning, Proteochemometrics, QSAR modelling, QSPR modelling, Software,
• Publication type
• Journal Article MeSH

The discovery of novel molecules with desirable properties is a classic challenge in medicinal chemistry. With the recent advancements of machine learning, there has been a surge of de novo drug design tools. However, few resources exist that are user-friendly as well as easily customizable. In this application note, we present the new versatile open-source software package DrugEx for multiobjective reinforcement learning. This package contains the consolidated and redesigned scripts from the prior DrugEx papers including multiple generator architectures, a variety of scoring tools, and multiobjective optimization methods. It has a flexible application programming interface and can readily be used via the command line interface or the graphical user interface GenUI. The DrugEx package is publicly available at https://github.com/CDDLeiden/DrugEx.

• MeSH
• Deep Learning * MeSH
• Drug Design MeSH
• Software MeSH
• Machine Learning MeSH
• Publication type
• Journal Article MeSH
• Research Support, Non-U.S. Gov't MeSH