Quantitative structure-activity relationship modeling of growth hormone secretagogues agonist activity of some tetrahydroisoquinoline 1-carboxamides

Growth hormone secretagogue agonist activities for a data set of 45 tetrahydroisoquinoline 1-carboxamides were modeled using several kinds of molecular descriptors from DRAGON software. A linear model with six variables selected from a large pool of two-dimensional descriptors described 80% of cross-validation data variance. Similar results were found for a model obtained from a pool of three-dimensional descriptors. Size and hydrophilicity-related atomic properties such as mass, polarizability, and van der Waals volume were determined to be the most relevant for the differential growth hormone secretagogue agonist activities of the compounds studied. In addition, Artificial Neural Networks were trained using optimum variables from the linear models; however, they were found to overfit the data and resulted in similar or lower predictive power.