Prediction and Prioritisation of Novel Anthelmintic Candidates from Public Databases Using Deep Learning and Available Bioactivity Data Sets

Abstract

The control of socioeconomically important parasitic roundworms (nematodes) of animals has become challenging or ineffective due to problems associated with widespread resistance in these worms to most classes of chemotherapeutic drugs (anthelmintics) currently available. Thus, there is an urgent need to discover and develop novel compounds with unique mechanisms of action to underpin effective parasite control programmes. Here, we evaluated an in silico (computational) approach to accelerate the discovery of new anthelmintics against the parasitic nematode Haemonchus contortus (barber’s pole worm) as a model system. Using a supervised machine learning workflow, we trained and assessed a mul..