Retention, not flux: endpoint confounding caps computational prediction of peptide skin penetration, with a delivery-aware reframing

Abstract

Bioactive peptides are now central to cosmetic and dermatological actives, yet predicting whether a given sequence will reach its site of action in skin remains unsolved. We contend that the dominant framing, predicting a single binary "skin permeability" label from sequence, is ill-posed, and that this, rather than a shortage of modelling power, explains the fields stalled predictive performance. The scope of the claim is narrow: barrier-crossing propensity is a legitimate, learnable function of molecular structure, whereas the vehicle- and endpoint-agnostic binary label that the literature supplies is not. We support this with a first-principles analysis and a study of public-source data. First, the experimental endpoint most commonly reported, transdermal flux into a diffusion-cell receptor compartment (OECD Test Guideline 428), conflates two opposite outcomes (genuine deep delivery and undesired systemic transport) and is, for a cosmetic active, frequently a failure signal rather than a success signal. That receptor flux is an imperfect measure of cutaneous bioavailability is long established in dermatopharmacokinetics; our contribution is to show that the same confound, inherited through scraped labels, is what caps machine learning from sequence. Second, reported "permeability" is a property of the sequence x delivery-vehicle x measurement-compartment triad, two terms of which are usually unrecorded. Third, on public-source data, a physicochemical intrinsic-permeability estimate (Potts-Guy) carries no positive predictive signal for scraped penetration labels (grouped AUC 0.45, 95% CI 0.40-0.51); sequence-only classifiers plateau in the mid-0.70s with diminishing returns as labels accumulate (AUC 0.70-0.77); and the same descriptor pipeline on a clean single-endpoint membrane dataset scores materially higher (AUC 0.83, non-overlapping CI). Our proposed reframing separates barrier-crossing (data-driven, sequence-level) from depth-and-retention (physics-driven, delivery-aware) and treats intrinsic transdermal flux as a regulatory risk axis; we close by proposing a triad-annotated reporting schema and a seed benchmark.