ABSTRACT
The drug discovery/development process in pharmaceutical industry is increasingly encountering high cost and competitiveness. In order to alleviate these problems, steps are being regularly undertaken to simultaneously reduce the cost and time required for the drug discovery/development process. [Quantitative] structure activity/property/toxicity relationship [(Q) SAR/QSPR/QSTR] based drug design has become one of the most standard and authoritative approaches used in drug design. The main problem in (Q) SAR pertains to the qualitative nature of chemical structures. Accordingly, one cannot have a direct correlation between qualitative chemical structures and quantitative biological activity. However, this problem can be easily overcome through quantification of chemical structures by making use of topology-based molecular descriptors (MDs). Pendentancy-based MDs constitute a very small fraction of topology-based MDs. In the present study, various pendentancy-based MDs have been defined, and their role in SAR/QSAR/QSPR/QSTR studies briefly reviewed.
