The Influence of Artificial Intelligence in Drug Discovery and Development

Over the years, the influence of artificial intelligence has grown tremendously over diverse fields, and drug discovery and development are no exception. With humongous digitalization in pharmaceutical industries, the resource and time-consuming processes required by the industry are being optimized by the application of artificial intelligence. Rapid improvements in computational hardware have played a synergistic role in the adoption of artificial intelligence in drug discovery and development. Techniques of artificial intelligence like transfer learning, neural networks, graph neural networks and generative networks can add substantial improvement in the progress. Various stages of drug discovery like target identification, lead identification, lead optimization, clinical trials, adverse effect prediction and drug repurposing can benefit from the utilization of artificial intelligence. Adoption of various artificial intelligence techniques offers benefits like personalized medicine, cost reduction and faster development. On the other hand, there are some critical challenges to be addressed like data quality, availability, transparency, domain knowledge integration and biases. Overall, there is a huge potential for the artificial intelligence in drug discovery and development. Some of the notable systems developed recently are AlphaFold, DeepChem, ODDT, DeeperBind and DeepAffinity.