CNS MPO score

Central Nervous System (CNS) drugs are special in the sense that they have to penetrate the Blood-Brain Barrier (BBB) in order to have any effect on their target. It is also known that they exhibit physico-chemical properties from certain ranges, forming a smaller subset in the large property space of orally available drugs. Wager and his co-researchers at Pfizer built a CNS Multiparameter Optimization (MPO) algorithm for generating a score that used 6 common physico-chemical properties (molecular weight (MW), logP, logD at pH 7.4, topological polar surface area (TPSA), the number of H-bond donors (HBD) and the pKa of the most basic center of the molecule) to build a relationship between this smaller CNS property space and CNS drug-likeness. The research revealed that CNS drugs already on the market and potential candidates show high MPO score values (so called desirability score values ≥ 4.0 on a scale between 0 and 6), making this a useful tool at the design stage to accelerate the identification of compounds with increased probability of success. Since the publication of the research the CNS MPO Score has become a generally accepted algorithm in the CNS-oriented medicinal chemistry community. Chemaxon's CNS MPO Score Predictor is able to calculate the CNS MPO score using the algorithm published by Wager et al.