Artificial neural network modeling studies to predict the yield of enzymatic synthesis of betulinic acid ester

3β-O-phthalic ester of betulinic acid was synthesized from reaction of betulinic acid and phthalic anhydride using lipase as biocatalyst. This ester has clinical potential as an anticancer agent. In this study, artificial neural network (ANN) analysis of Candida antarctica lipase (Novozym 435) -catalyzed esterification of betulinic acid with phthalic anhydride was carried out. A multilayer feed-forward neural network trained with an error back-propagation algorithm was incorporated for developing a predictive model. The input parameters of the model are reaction time, reaction temperature, enzyme amount and substrate molar ratio while the percentage isolated yield of ester is the output. Four different training algorithms, belonging to two classes, namely gradient descent and Levenberg-