ToxCML: A Hybrid mfCoQ-RASAR-Based Platform Integrating Consensus QSAR and Read-Across for Comprehensive Multi-End Point Toxicity Assessment

Computational in silico methods offer a powerful alternative to animal-based toxicity testing, which remains time-consuming, expensive, and ethically challenging. In practice, QSAR and read-across (RA) are among the most widely explored approaches, yet both suffer from important limitations, including end point-specific modeling, restricted applicability domains, nonquantitative or subjective analogue selection, and sensitivity to biases in chemical space coverage. To address these limitations, this study introduces ToxCML, a large-scale hybrid multifeature consensus quantitative RA Structure-Activity Relationship (mfCoQ-RASAR) platform that unifies consensus QSAR and similarity-based consensus RA into a weight-optimized workflow for predicting 18 toxicity end points across 54,601 unique chemicals. The framework combines multiple molecular representations (MACCS, Morgan, atom pair fingerprints, RDKit fingerprints, and physicochemical descriptors) with machine-learning-based QSAR and k-NN RA models and incorporates tiered applicability-domain analysis and chemical-space mapping that indicate broadly overlapping training-test distributions and in-domain coverage generally exceeding 95% across end points. Across all end points and evaluation settings involving unseen test sets or external validation sets, the hybrid mfCoQ-RASAR models achieve strong discrimination and accuracy (AUC approximately 0.86-0.99; BACC 0.73-0.98), with a consistent performance hierarchy in which mfCoQ-RASAR provides the highest or near-highest performance, consensus QSAR remains highly competitive, and consensus RA, while weaker, still offers informative predictive and analogue-based discriminatory capability. These results indicate that our framework delivers reliable, chemically well-contextualized, and broadly applicable multiend point toxicity predictions for unseen compounds and may support large-scale toxicity screening, hazard prioritization, and efforts to reduce animal testing in regulatory and industrial settings. The ToxCML platform is accessible through a public web server available at http://cardiosim.metaheart.kr:8080/.

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Publication Details

Journal
Journal of Chemical Information and Modeling
Published
2026-04-13
DOI
https://doi.org/10.1021/acs.jcim.6c00357
Primary Topic
Computational Drug Discovery Methods
Type
article
Field-Weighted Citation Impact
0.00

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article

ToxCML: A Hybrid mfCoQ-RASAR-Based Platform Integrating Consensus QSAR and Read-Across for Comprehensive Multi-End Point Toxicity Assessment

Muhammad Adnan Pramudito, Abdul Latif Fauzan, Yunendah Nur Fuadah, Ki Moo Lim et al.
Journal of Chemical Information and Modeling
Computational Drug Discovery Methods
article

ToxCML: A Hybrid mfCoQ-RASAR-Based Platform Integrating Consensus QSAR and Read-Across for Comprehensive Multi-End Point Toxicity Assessment

Muhammad Adnan Pramudito, Abdul Latif Fauzan, Yunendah Nur Fuadah, Ki Moo Lim, Rahmafatin Nurul Izza, Fauzan Syarif Nursyafi
article en

Abstract

Computational in silico methods offer a powerful alternative to animal-based toxicity testing, which remains time-consuming, expensive, and ethically challenging. In practice, QSAR and read-across (RA) are among the most widely explored approaches, yet both suffer from important limitations, including end point-specific modeling, restricted applicability domains, nonquantitative or subjective analogue selection, and sensitivity to biases in chemical space coverage. To address these limitations, this study introduces ToxCML, a large-scale hybrid multifeature consensus quantitative RA Structure-Activity Relationship (mfCoQ-RASAR) platform that unifies consensus QSAR and similarity-based consensus RA into a weight-optimized workflow for predicting 18 toxicity end points across 54,601 unique chemicals. The framework combines multiple molecular representations (MACCS, Morgan, atom pair fingerprints, RDKit fingerprints, and physicochemical descriptors) with machine-learning-based QSAR and k-NN RA models and incorporates tiered applicability-domain analysis and chemical-space mapping that indicate broadly overlapping training-test distributions and in-domain coverage generally exceeding 95% across end points. Across all end points and evaluation settings involving unseen test sets or external validation sets, the hybrid mfCoQ-RASAR models achieve strong discrimination and accuracy (AUC approximately 0.86-0.99; BACC 0.73-0.98), with a consistent performance hierarchy in which mfCoQ-RASAR provides the highest or near-highest performance, consensus QSAR remains highly competitive, and consensus RA, while weaker, still offers informative predictive and analogue-based discriminatory capability. These results indicate that our framework delivers reliable, chemically well-contextualized, and broadly applicable multiend point toxicity predictions for unseen compounds and may support large-scale toxicity screening, hazard prioritization, and efforts to reduce animal testing in regulatory and industrial settings. The ToxCML platform is accessible through a public web server available at http://cardiosim.metaheart.kr:8080/.

Journal of Chemical Information and ModelingVol. 66(8)
Kumoh National Institute of Technology (KR), Heart Foundation (US), Computational Physics (United States) (US), Convergence (US), Telkom University (ID)
Ministry of Education, National Research Foundation of Korea, Ministry of Science and ICT, South Korea, Institute for Information and Communications Technology Promotion
Zero hunger
Openalex Percentile: Top 15%
Computational Drug Discovery Methods
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