The analysis of the structural similarity of some antidepressants and anti-inflammatory molecules

Currently many studies link depression to inflammation and mechanism that underlie this connection are being elucidated. Also new treatment strategies for these comorbid diseases that combine the use of antidepressants (AD) with anti-inflammatory agents (AI) are being suggested. However, to the best of our knowledge, no study yet investigated the structural similarity of the compounds used to treat these two diseases. Thus, in this study we examined whether there is any structural similarity between AD and AI molecules in silico. We gathered from the literature the AI and AD derivatives using Clarivates Analytics database (Web of Science) and we covered the period from 2008-2017. Then we did a manual search and obtained the most similar structures. In order to be able to discuss our results we also used computational methods and measured the similarity of the compounds using the cosine and Tanimoto similarity coefficients. By this method, we found 12 similar structures two of these, which are 7-{2-[4-(2-chlorophenyl)piperazin-1-yl]ethyl}-1,3-dimethylpurine-2,6-dione known as (KMUP-1) (AI8), and 7-{4-[4-(3-chlorophenyl)piperazin-1-yl]butyl}-1,3-dimethylpurine-2,6-dione (AD10), their similarity was 96%. We found also that the coumarin derivatives AD16 and AD17 are 80% similar to the compound AI12. Keywords: antidepressant, anti-inflammatory, structure, similarity, comorbid diseases