Construction of a Quantitative Structure Activity Relationship (QSAR) Model to Predict the Absorption of Cephalosporins in Zebrafish for Toxicity Study

Cephalosporins are beta-lactam antibiotics that are widely used in China. Five generations of cephalosporins have been introduced in clinical practice to date; moreover, some new candidates are also undergoing clinical evaluations. To improve the success rates of new drug development, we need to have a comprehensive understanding about the relationship between the structure of cephalosporins and the toxicity that it induces at an early stage. In the cephalosporins toxicity study using zebrafish, the drug absorption is a key point. In this study, we determined the absorption of cephalosporins in zebrafish during toxicity test. The internal concentrations of 19 cephalosporins in zebrafish were determined using a developed liquid chromatography-tandem mass spectrometry (LC-MS/MS) method. Furthermore, a quantitative structure-activity relationship (QSAR) model was established by multilinear regression; moreover, it was used to predict the absorption of cephalosporins in zebrafish. During leave-one-out cross-validation, a satisfactory performance was obtained with a predictive ability (q²) of 0.839. The prediction ability of the model was further confirmed when the predictive ability (q²) was 0.859 in external prediction. The best QSAR model, which was based on five molecular descriptors, exhibited a promising predictive performance and robustness. In experiments involving drug toxicity, the developed QSAR model was used to estimate internal concentrations of cephalosporins. Thus, the toxicity results were correlated with the internal concentration of the drug within the larvae. The developed model served as a new powerful tool in zebrafish toxicity tests.