Quantitative Structure–Activity Relationship and Molecular Docking Studies of Imidazolopyrimidine Amides as Potent Dipeptidyl Peptidase-4 (DPP4) Inhibitors

Type 2 diabetes (T2DM) is a metabolic disorder disease and DPP-4 inhibitors are a class of oral hypoglycemic that blocks the dipeptidyl peptidase-4 (DPP-4) enzyme. DPP-4 inhibitors reduce glucagon and blood glucose levels and don’t have side effects such as hypoglycemia or weight gain. In this paper, a series of imidazolopyrimidine amides analogues as DPP4 inhibitors were selected for quantitative structure-activity relationship (QSAR) analysis and docking studies. A collection of chemometric methods such as multiple linear regression (MLR), factor analysis-based multiple linear regression (FA-MLR), principal component regression (PCR), genetic algorithm for variable selection-MLR (GA-MLR) and partial least squared combined with genetic algorithm for variable selection (GA-PLS), were conducted to make relations between structural features and DPP4 inhibitory of a variety of imidazolopyrimidine amides derivatives. GA-PLS represented superior results with high statistical quality (R2 = 0.94 and Q2 = 0.80) for predicting the activity of the compounds. Docking studies of these compounds reveals and confirms that compounds 15, 18, 25, 26, and 28 are introduced as good candidates for DPP-4 inhibitors were introduced as a good candidate for DPP-4 inhibitory compounds.