QSAR of cytochrome inhibitors.

Cytochrome P450 (CYP450) enzymes are predominantly involved in the Phase I metabolism of xenobiotics. Metabolic inhibition and induction can give rise to clinically important drug-drug interactions. Metabolic stability is a prerequisite for sustaining the therapeutically relevant concentrations, and very often drug candidates are sacrificed due to poor metabolic profiles. Computational tools such as quantitative structure-activity relationships are widely used to study different metabolic end points successfully to accelerate the drug discovery process. There are a lot of computational studies on clinically important CYPs already reported in recent years. But other clinically significant families are to yet be explored computationally. Powerfulness of quantitative structure-activity relationship will drive computational chemists to develop new potent and selective inhibitors of different classes of CYPs for the treatment of different diseases with least drug-drug interactions. Furthermore, there is a need to enhance the accuracy, interpretability and confidence in the computational models in accelerating the drug discovery pathways.