Machine Learning Approach to Anticancer Activity Prediction of Transition-Metal Complexes Based on a Large-Scale Experimental Database

J Med Chem. 2026 Apr 13. doi: 10.1021/acs.jmedchem.5c02755. Online ahead of print.

ABSTRACT

In this work, we developed a straightforward data-driven approach to predict the cytotoxicity of metal complexes based entirely on their (metal + ligands) composition. To this end, we have manually curated MetalCytoToxDB─a comprehensive experimental database comprising 26,500 IC₅₀ values for 7050 metal complexes against 754 cell lines from 1921 articles. Based on these, machine learning models were created to accurately assign the cytotoxicity class within the ruthenium and iridium subsets. Moreover, external validation of the best-performing model on the unseen data was carried out. The possibility of multimetal predictions was explored, enabling assessment of cytotoxicity among the complexes of metals, for which experimental data are relatively scarce. The interpretability and limitations of the developed models are discussed. Finally, a pipeline for the effective high-throughput computational screening of ruthenium complexes is proposed. The MetalCytoToxDB is available online for AI-assisted exploration at https://biometaldb.streamlit.app/.

PMID:41969144 | DOI:10.1021/acs.jmedchem.5c02755