Lipinski's rule of five
Lipinski's rule of five also known as the Pfizer's rule of five or simply the Rule of five (RO5) is a rule of thumb to evaluate druglikeness or determine if a chemical compound with a certain pharmacological or biological activity has properties that would make it a likely orally active drug in humans. The rule was formulated by Christopher A. Lipinski in 1997, based on the observation that most orally administered drugs are relatively small and moderately lipophilic molecules.
The rule describes molecular properties important for a drug's pharmacokinetics in the human body, including their absorption, distribution, metabolism, and excretion ("ADME"). However, the rule does not predict if a compound is pharmacologically active.
The rule is important to keep in mind during drug discovery when a pharmacologically active lead structure is optimized step-wise to increase the activity and selectivity of the compound as well as to ensure drug-like physicochemical properties are maintained as described by Lipinski's rule. Candidate drugs that conform to the RO5 tend to have lower attrition rates during clinical trials and hence have an increased chance of reaching the market.
Components of the rule
Lipinski's rule states that, in general, an orally active drug has no more than one violation of the following criteria:
- No more than 5 hydrogen bond donors (the total number of nitrogen–hydrogen and oxygen–hydrogen bonds)
- No more than 10 hydrogen bond acceptors (all nitrogen or oxygen atoms)
- A molecular mass less than 500 daltons
- An octanol-water partition coefficient log P not greater than 5
Note that all numbers are multiples of five, which is the origin of the rule's name. As with many other rules of thumb, (such as Baldwin's rules for ring closure), there are many exceptions to Lipinski's Rule.
- Partition coefficient log P in −0.4 to +5.6 range
- Molar refractivity from 40 to 130
- Molecular weight from 180 to 500
- Number of atoms from 20 to 70 (includes H-bond donors [e.g.;OH's and NH's] and H-bond acceptors [e.g.; N's and O's])
- Polar surface area no greater than 140 Ǻ2
Also the 500 molecular weight cutoff has been questioned. Polar surface area and the number of rotatable bonds has been found to better discriminate between compounds that are orally active and those that are not for a large data set of compounds in the rat. In particular, compounds which meet only the two criteria of:
- 10 or fewer rotatable bonds and
- polar surface area equal to or less than 140 Å2
are predicted to have good oral bioavailability.
During drug discovery, lipophilicity and molecular weight are often increased in order to improve the affinity and selectivity of the drug candidate. Hence it is often difficult to maintain drug-likeness (i.e., RO5 compliance) during hit and lead optimization. Hence it has been proposed that members of screening libraries from which hits are discovered should be biased toward lower molecular weight and lipophility so that medicinal chemists will have an easier time in delivering optimized drug development candidates that are also drug-like. Hence the rule of five has been extended to the rule of three (RO3) for defining lead-like compounds.
A rule of three compliant compound is defined as one that has:
- octanol-water partition coefficient log P not greater than 3
- molecular mass less than 300 daltons
- not more than 3 hydrogen bond donors
- not more than 3 hydrogen bond acceptors
- not more than 3 rotatable bonds
- Christopher A. Lipinski
- Fragment-based lead discovery
- Polar surface area
- Biopharmaceutics Classification System
- Chemical property
- Molecular property
- Physical property
- Chemical structure
- Chemicalize.org: List of predicted structure based properties
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- Lipinski CA (December 2004). "Lead- and drug-like compounds: the rule-of-five revolution". Drug Discovery Today: Technologies 1 (4): 337–341. doi:10.1016/j.ddtec.2004.11.007.
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- Leeson PD, Springthorpe B (November 2007). "The influence of drug-like concepts on decision-making in medicinal chemistry". Nat Rev Drug Discov 6 (11): 881–90. doi:10.1038/nrd2445. PMID 17971784.
- Leo A, Hansch C, Elkins D (1971). "Partition coefficients and their uses". Chem Rev 71 (6): 525–616. doi:10.1021/cr60274a001.
- Ghose AK, Viswanadhan VN, Wendoloski JJ (January 1999). "A knowledge-based approach in designing combinatorial or medicinal chemistry libraries for drug discovery. 1. A qualitative and quantitative characterization of known drug databases". J Comb Chem 1 (1): 55–68. doi:10.1021/cc9800071. PMID 10746014.
- Veber DF, Johnson SR, Cheng HY, Smith BR, Ward KW, Kopple KD (June 2002). "Molecular properties that influence the oral bioavailability of drug candidates". J. Med. Chem. 45 (12): 2615–23. doi:10.1021/jm020017n. PMID 12036371.
- Congreve M, Carr R, Murray C, Jhoti H (October 2003). "A 'rule of three' for fragment-based lead discovery?". Drug Discov. Today 8 (19): 876–7. doi:10.1016/S1359-6446(03)02831-9. PMID 14554012.
- Interactive Rule of Five calculator
- Free online calculations of Hydrogen bond donor/acceptor, mass and logP using ChemAxon's Marvin and Calculator Plugins – requires Java
- Calculation of Druglikeness – requires Java