Abstract

A set of benzophenone derivatives was evaluated for the antimalarial activity against Plasmodium berghei in mice and the mean survival time of mice for all the compounds was determined. The QSAR analysis was carried out for the fourteen benzophenone derivatives using different physicochemical descriptors. The multiple linear regression analysis was used to correlate the physicochemical descriptors with the antimalarial activity of the benzophenone derivatives from the training set and the best QSAR model was developed, which was further used to predict the antimalarial activity of other compounds from the class of benzophenones. To confirm the predictivity of the best QSAR model, a new set (test set) of six compounds was designed, synthesized and evaluated for the antimalarial activity. A good correlation between the experimental and predicted antimalarial activities was obtained for the test set compounds in the validation procedure, indicating the high predictivity of the developed QSAR model. Five benzophenone derivatives, which showed good antimalarial activity, were further studied for their drug-likeliness characteristic and per cent oral absorption using software “QikProp”. It was observed that all the five benzophenone derivatives were found to be good drug candidates and showed good oral absorption.