Cited by 3,228Computational Drug Discovery MethodsMachine Learning in Materials ScienceMachine Learning in Healthcare

Applications of machine learning in drug discovery and development

Open access
Vamathevan, Jessica, Clark, Dominic, Czodrowski, Paul, Dunham, Ian, Ferran, Edgardo, Lee, George, Li, Bin, Madabhushi, Anant +3 more·2019·Nature Reviews Drug Discovery

Abstract

Drug discovery and development pipelines are long, complex and depend on numerous factors. Machine learning (ML) approaches provide a set of tools that can improve discovery and decision making for well-specified questions with abundant, high-quality data. Opportunities to apply ML occur in all stages of drug discovery. Examples include target validation, identification of prognostic biomarkers and analysis of digital pathology data in clinical trials. Applications have ranged in context and methodology, with some approaches yielding accurate predictions and insights. The challenges of applying ML lie primarily with the lack of interpretability and repeatability of ML-generated results, which may limit their application. In all areas, systematic and comprehensive high-dimensional data still need to be generated. With ongoing efforts to tackle these issues, as well as increasing awareness of the factors needed to validate ML approaches, the application of ML can promote data-driven decision making and has the potential to speed up the process and reduce failure rates in drug discovery and development.

The claims and statistics of this paper haven’t been checked yet.

Run the check — free, no account needed. It reads the open-access text and checks the sources it cites.

A few free checks a day · papers already verified open instantly · results are public

Integrity signals

Registry

Crossref · 10.1038/s41573-019-0024-5

Cites

115 of 115 references verified0 citation errors · 0 not checkable

Statistics

Claims the paper makes

The claims and statistics of this paper haven’t been checked yet.

Run the check — free, no account needed. It reads the open-access text and checks the sources it cites.

A few free checks a day · papers already verified open instantly · results are public

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?

  • The field of drug discovery is a pertinent example, with many tasks that could leverage multidimensional data including target identification and validation, prediction of drug interactions and prediction of side effects.

    “The field of drug discovery is a pertinent example, with many tasks that could leverage multidimensional data including target identification and validation, prediction of drug interactions and prediction of side effects 177”

    From Multimodal biomedical AI (2022) · cites this paper as [177]

    The Target identification and validation section says multidimensional data can be used with ML to predict and validate drug targets. The Outlook also describes the potential to aid decisions about therapies’ side effects. The passages found do not establish prediction of drug interactions as a task, so that example is unsupported by our copy. (LLM, conf=0.84)

    Experimental — accuracy not yet measured
  • The impact of big data and AI in drug discovery continues to attract significant interest from investors, industrial and academic scientists, and legislators.

    “The impact of big data and AI in drug discovery, the subject of a 2020 review in this journal (4), continues to attract significant interest: Investors (5, 6), industrial (7, 8) and academic scientists (9, 10), and legislators (https://bit.ly/40LRAip) discuss the impact of AI for drug discovery (AI4DD).”
  • One key challenge of using AI in drug discovery is the availability of suitable data.

    “One of the key challenges is the availability of suitable data [40].”
  • The ever-growing nature of chemical matter (in contrast to the finite number of genes) demands computational methods to provide a first estimate of the biological properties of compounds.

    “The ever-growing nature of chemical matter (in contrast to the finite number of genes) demands computational methods to provide a first estimate of the biological properties of compounds41.”

Self-check

Percentages, sums and reported differences re-computed from the paper’s own numbers.

The self-check needs the paper’s full text.

Cites

Flagged first, then by citations

Research works printed but not linked: 1

  1. [30]Al-Lazikani B in Bioinformatics — From Genomes to Therapies Ch. 36 (Wiley-VCH, 2008).

Cited by

Sorted by citations

Authors
Vamathevan, J., Clark, D., Czodrowski, P., Dunham, I., Ferran, E., Lee, G., Li, B., Madabhushi, A., Shah, P., Spitzer, M., & Zhao, S.
Affiliations
  • European Bioinformatics Institute (GB)
  • TU Dortmund University (DE)
  • Bristol-Myers Squibb (United States) (US)
  • Louis Stokes Cleveland VA Medical Center (US)
  • Merck Healthcare KGaA, Darmstadt (Germany) (DE)
  • Pfizer (United States) (US)
Corresponding author
Vamathevan, Jessica
Venue
Nature Reviews Drug Discovery
Published
2019-04-11
Volume
18
Issue
6
Pages
463-477
ISSN
  • 1474-1776 (ISSN-L)
  • 1474-1784
OpenAlex
W2937307539
Cited by
3,228
References
115
Citations by year
2026: 665 · 2025: 616 · 2024: 576 · 2023: 461 · 2022: 362 · 2021: 316 · 2020: 182 · 2019: 44 · 2013: 1 · 2012: 1
FWCI
18.79
Type
journal article
Language
en
Open access
Locations
  • Nature Reviews Drug Discovery (publishedVersion)
  • PubMed (publishedVersion)
  • PubMed Central (acceptedVersion)
Funders
  • U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs (I01 BX004121)
  • National Cancer Institute (U24CA199374, R01CA216579, R01CA208236, R01CA202752, R01CA220581)
Topics
  • Physical Sciences › Computer Science › Computational Theory and Mathematics › Computational Drug Discovery Methods
  • Physical Sciences › Materials Science › Materials Chemistry › Machine Learning in Materials Science
  • Physical Sciences › Computer Science › Artificial Intelligence › Machine Learning in Healthcare
Keywords
machine learning, drug discovery, drug development, target validation, prognostic factors, digital pathology, clinical trials, interpretability, data-driven decision making, high-dimensional data
MeSH terms
Machine Learning, Animals, Humans, Drug Design, Neural Networks, Computer, Drug Discovery

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