Recent technological breakthroughs in medicinal chemistry arena had ameliorated 
the perspectives of quantitative structure-activity relationship (QSAR) methods. 
In this direction, we developed a group-based QSAR method based on 
pharmacophore-similarity concept which takes into account the 2D topological 
pharmacophoric descriptors and predicts the group-specific biological 
activities. This activity prediction may assist the contribution of certain 
pharmacophore features encoded by respective fragments toward activity 
improvement and/or detrimental effects. We termed this method as 
pharmacophore-similarity-based QSAR (PS-QSAR) and studied the activity 
contribution of fragments from 3-hydroxypyridinones derivatives possessing 
antimalarial activities.