Predicting Drug Quantifiability Boosts Dose-Response Profiling Efficiency.

High-throughput drug screening is a critical step in drug discovery, where initial low-cost assays identify compounds for more detailed, expensive dose-response profiling. Current strategies primarily focus on confirming biological activity, often assuming that active compounds will also yield a usable potency estimate. However, this assumption is frequently incorrect, as many active compounds fail to produce quantifiable potency data. This research introduces a novel framework that models "quantifiability" – the likelihood of obtaining a usable potency estimate – as a separate objective from biological activity. The study found that quantifiability is highly predictable from initial screening features, even more so than from molecular structure alone. This predictive capability remained robust across new chemical scaffolds and assay families, demonstrating that integrating quantifiability-aware triage can significantly optimize the allocation of costly dose-response profiling resources.