Advancing drug discovery via artificial intelligence
Open accessAbstract
Drug discovery and development are among the most important translational science activities that contribute to human health and wellbeing. However, the development of a new drug is a very complex, expensive, and long process which typically costs 2.6 billion USD and takes 12 years on average. How to decrease the costs and speed up new drug discovery has become a challenging and urgent question in industry. Artificial intelligence (AI) combined with new experimental technologies is expected to make the hunt for new pharmaceuticals quicker, cheaper, and more effective. We discuss here emerging applications of AI to improve the drug discovery process.
Integrity signals
Registry
Cites
Statistics
Claims the paper makes
Claims other papers make about this one
Each is checked against this paper’s own text: does it say what the citing paper says it does?
Deep learning has been employed to facilitate drug discovery.
“facilitate drug discovery [10]”
From Challenges in AI-driven Biomedical Multimodal Data Fusion and Analysis (2025) · cites this paper as [10]
Cites
LeCun, Y., Bengio, Y., & Hinton, G. (2015) · Nature · doi:10.1038/nature14539 · Cited by 84,126 · see citing works
MoleculeNet: a benchmark for molecular machine learning
Wu, Z., Ramsundar, B., Feinberg, E. N., Gomes, J., Geniesse, C., Pappu, A. S., Leswing, K., & Pande, V. (2018) · Chemical Science · doi:10.1039/c7sc02664a · Cited by 3,107 · see citing works
Equivalent-accuracy accelerated neural-network training using analogue memory
Ambrogio, S., Narayanan, P., Tsai, H., Shelby, R. M., Boybat, I., di Nolfo, C., Sidler, S., Giordano, M., Bodini, M., Farinha, N. C. P., et al. (2018) · Nature · doi:10.1038/s41586-018-0180-5 · Cited by 1,151 · see citing works
DeepTox: toxicity prediction using deep learning
Mayr, A., Klambauer, G., Unterthiner, T., & Hochreiter, S. (2016) · Frontiers in Environmental Science · doi:10.3389/fenvs.2015.00080 · Cited by 1,081 · see citing works
Artificial intelligence in drug development: Present status and future prospects
Mak, K.-K., & Pichika, M. R. (2019) · Drug Discovery Today · doi:10.1016/j.drudis.2018.11.014 · Cited by 1,018 · see citing works
Demystifying Multitask Deep Neural Networks for Quantitative Structure–Activity Relationships
Xu, Y., Ma, J., Liaw, A., Sheridan, R. P., & Svetnik, V. (2017) · Journal of Chemical Information and Modeling · doi:10.1021/acs.jcim.7b00087 · Cited by 238 · see citing works
Clark, A. J., Negron, C., Hauser, K., Sun, M., Wang, L., Abel, R., & Friesner, R. A. (2019) · Journal of Molecular Biology · doi:10.1016/j.jmb.2019.02.003 · Cited by 91 · see citing works
Flagged first, then by citations
Cited by
Sorted by citations
Artificial intelligence in drug discovery and development
Paul, D., Sanap, G., Shenoy, S., Kalyane, D., Kalia, K., & Tekade, R. K. (2021) · Drug Discovery Today · doi:10.1016/j.drudis.2020.10.010 · Cited by 1,695 · see citing works
Artificial intelligence to deep learning: machine intelligence approach for drug discovery
Gupta, R., Srivastava, D., Sahu, M., Tiwari, S., Ambasta, R. K., & Kumar, P. (2021) · Molecular Diversity · doi:10.1007/s11030-021-10217-3 · Cited by 1,473 · see citing works
Machine Learning Methods in Drug Discovery
Patel, L., Shukla, T., Huang, X., Ussery, D. W., & Wang, S. (2020) · Molecules · doi:10.3390/molecules25225277 · Cited by 460 · see citing works
Drawbacks of artificial intelligence and their potential solutions in the healthcare sector.
khan, B., Fatima, H., Qureshi, A., Kumar, S., Hanan, A., Hussain, J., & Abdullah, S. (2023) · Biomedical Materials & Devices · doi:10.1007/s44174-023-00063-2 · Cited by 461 · see citing works
Vatansever, S., Schlessinger, A., Wacker, D., Kaniskan, H. Ü., Jin, J., Zhou, M., & Zhang, B. (2021) · Medicinal Research Reviews · doi:10.1002/med.21764 · Cited by 429 · see citing works
Blockchain and Artificial Intelligence Technology in E-Health
Tagde, P., Tagde, S., Bhattacharya, T., Tagde, P., Chopra, H., Akter, R., Kaushik, D., & Rahman, M. H. (2021) · Environmental Science and Pollution Research · doi:10.1007/s11356-021-16223-0 · Cited by 281 · see citing works
Next-generation business models for artificial intelligence start-ups in the healthcare industry
Kulkov, I. (2023) · International Journal of Entrepreneurial Behavior & Research · doi:10.1108/ijebr-04-2021-0304 · Cited by 97 · see citing works
The machine learning life cycle and the cloud: implications for drug discovery
Spjuth, O., Frid, J., & Hellander, A. (2021) · Expert Opinion on Drug Discovery · doi:10.1080/17460441.2021.1932812 · Cited by 67 · see citing works
Challenges in AI-driven Biomedical Multimodal Data Fusion and Analysis
Liu, J., Cen, X., Yi, C., Wang, F.-A., Ding, J., Cheng, J., Wu, Q., Gai, B., Zhou, Y., He, R., et al. (2025) · Genomics, Proteomics & Bioinformatics · doi:10.1093/gpbjnl/qzaf011 · Cited by 75 · see citing works
Advancing health care via artificial intelligence: From concept to clinic
Sandeep Ganesh, G., Kolusu, A. S., Prasad, K., Samudrala, P. K., & Nemmani, K. V. S. (2022) · European Journal of Pharmacology · doi:10.1016/j.ejphar.2022.175320 · Cited by 43 · see citing works
Wu, Y., Liu, Z., Wu, L., Chen, M., & Tong, W. (2021) · Frontiers in Artificial Intelligence · doi:10.3389/frai.2021.729834 · Cited by 26 · see citing works
Tse, E. G., Aithani, L., Anderson, M., Cardoso-Silva, J., Cincilla, G., Conduit, G. J., Galushka, M., Guan, D., Hallyburton, I., Irwin, B. W. J., et al. (2021) · Journal of Medicinal Chemistry · doi:10.1021/acs.jmedchem.1c00313 · Cited by 18 · see citing works
- Authors
- Chan, H. C. S., Shan, H., Dahoun, T., Vogel, H., & Yuan, S.
- Affiliations
- Chinese Academy of Sciences (CN)
- Shanghai Institute of Pharmaceutical Industry (CN)
- École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (CH)
- Corresponding author
- Yuan, Shuguang
- Venue
- Trends in Pharmacological Sciences
- Publisher
- Elsevier BV
- Published
- 2019-08
- Volume
- 40
- Issue
- 8
- Pages
- 592-604
- ISSN
- 0165-6147 (ISSN-L)
- OpenAlex
- W2962398326
- Cited by
- 654
- References
- 7
- Citations by year
- 2026: 54 · 2025: 94 · 2024: 131 · 2023: 157 · 2022: 82 · 2021: 95 · 2020: 36 · 2019: 5
- FWCI
- 4.53
- Type
- journal article
- Language
- en
- Update notices
- erratum (2019-10-01)
- Open access
- green
- infoscience.epfl.ch
- Licence
- Locations
- Trends in Pharmacological Sciences (publishedVersion)
- PubMed (publishedVersion)
- Infoscience (Ecole Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne) (submittedVersion, cc-by-nc-nd)
- Funders
- Interdisciplinary Centre for Mathematical and Computational Modelling in Warsaw (GB71–3, GB70-3)
- European Community (FP7-KBBE-2013-613879)
- Topics
- Physical Sciences › Computer Science › Computational Theory and Mathematics › Computational Drug Discovery Methods
- Physical Sciences › Materials Science › Materials Chemistry › Machine Learning in Materials Science
- Health Sciences › Medicine › Health Informatics › Artificial Intelligence in Healthcare and Education
- Keywords
- artificial intelligence, drug discovery, drug development costs, translational research, pharmaceuticals
- MeSH terms
- Animals, Artificial Intelligence, Pharmaceutical Preparations, Humans, Pharmacology, Quantitative Structure-Activity Relationship, Drug Discovery, Translational Research, Biomedical
About these checks
Registry, retraction, Cites and statistics results are computed, not judged, with one exception: a printed reference that no index lists is read once by a model before it counts as a citation error. Claims are extracted by a model and kept only when their quote appears verbatim in the text; each cited source is then checked, with a model’s help, for whether it says what the claim relies on. Those verdicts can be wrong — read the claim’s quote and the cited source before relying on one.
Statistics and arithmetic are recomputed, not judged.
Confidence bands are shown only for fields calibrated on our annotated test set. None is calibrated yet, so no band is shown.
What counts as a claim ›How we measure confidence ›How we check this ›
Are you an author, or do you see a problem with this page? Request a review