Statistical models for identifying frequent hitters in high throughput screening

High throughput screening (HTS) interrogates compound libraries to find those that are “active” in an assay. To better understand compound behavior in HTS, we assessed an existing binomial survivor function (BSF) model of “frequent hitters” using 872 publicly available HTS data sets. We found large numbers of “infrequent hitters” using this model leading us to reject the BSF for identifying “frequent hitters.” As alternatives, we investigated generalized logistic, gamma, and negative binomial distributions as models for compound behavior. The gamma model reduced the proportion of both frequent and infrequent hitters relative to the BSF. Within this data set, conclusions about individual compound behavior were limited by the number of times individual compounds were tested (1–1613 times) and disproportionate testing of some compounds. Specifically, most tests (78%) were on a 309,847-compound subset (17.6% of compounds) each tested ≥ 300 times. We concluded that the disproportionate retesting of some compounds represents compound repurposing at scale rather than drug discovery. The approach to drug discovery represented by these 872 data sets characterizes the assays well by challenging them with many compounds while each compound is characterized poorly with a single assay. Aggregating the testing information from each compound across the multiple screens yielded a continuum with no clear boundary between normal and frequent hitting compounds.