A Review of QSAR Studies to Predict Activity of ACE Peptide Inhibitors

Background: Inhibition of angiotensin converting enzyme (i.e inhibition of cleaving angiotensin I to the potent vasoconstrictor angiotensin II) leads to the treatment and reduce the risk of cardiovascular diseases. Peptides (synthetic - natural) with ACE inhibitory activity were studied continuously during the last decades and resulting data were applied by medicinal chemists to design and develop new drugs. Their structure and activity/property relationships were studied during these years and different QSAR models were developed which assisted researchers and manufactures to reduce the cost of experiments. Developed models were reviewed in the present paper according to the applied dataset, descriptors, feature selection methods, model development and validation methods. The selected descriptors for different datasets and models were compared and discussed according to the experimental findings.