Drugs with SMILES Similar to Coxibs

Coxibs are a group of drugs with selective inhibition against cyclooxygenase-2 (COX-2) enzymes with increased interest from scientific community due to their side effects and potential other pharmacological mechanisms. The aim of this work is to utilize the chemical characteristics of coxibs in order to identify compounds with similar chemical structure. The approach is based on the assessment of the Simplified Molecular-Input Line-Entry System (SMILES) as adequate molecular structure representations for the identification of drug similarities. The similarity measurements are based on molecular fingerprints that were extracted from coxibs and the Maximum Consecutive Subsequence (MCS) algorithm. An ensemble of methods based on majority voting, weighting and equal weighting on the algorithms was further applied. Majority voting returned 200 similar compounds whereas weighting and equal weighting returned 53 and 27 compounds respectively. Interestingly, despite the independence of the methods, all three identified 20 common compounds. The identification of drugs with potential chemical similarity with coxibs, as revealed from similarity measurements of fingerprints and MCS scores could provide new insights for potential biological targets for coxibs or drugs that could interact with COX-2 or other biological targets of coxibs.