Ricerc@Sapienza

Cruzain is an established target for the identification of novel trypanocidal agents, but how good are in vitro/in vivo correlations? This work describes the development of a random forests model for the prediction of the bioavailability of cruzain inhibitors that are Trypanosoma cruzi killers. Some common properties that characterize drug-likeness are poorly represented in many established cruzain inhibitors. This correlates with the evidence that many high-affinity cruzain inhibitors are not trypanocidal agents against T. cruzi.

In prediction problems both response and covariates may have high
correlation with a second group of influential regressors, that can be
considered as background variables. An important challenge is to
perform variable selection and importance assessment among the
covariates in the presence of these variables. A clinical example is
the prediction of the lean body mass (response) from bioimpedance
(covariates), where anthropometric measures play the role of background
variables. We introduce a reduced dataset in which the variables