Relevant Applications of Generative Adversarial Networks in Drug Design and Discovery: Molecular Design, Dimensionality Reduction, and Peptide and Protein Design.

A growing body of evidence now suggests that artificial intelligence and machine learning techniques can serve as an indispensable foundation for the process of drug design and discovery. In light of latest advancements in computing technologies, deep learning algorithms are being created during the development of clinically useful drugs for treatment of a number of diseases. In this review, we focus on the latest developments for three particular arenas in drug design and discovery research using deep learning approaches, such as generative adversarial network (GAN) frameworks. Firstly, we review drug design and discovery studies that leverage various GAN techniques to assess one main application such as molecular design in drug design and discovery. In addition, we describe various GAN models to fulfill the dimension reduction task of single-cell data in the preclinical stage of the drug development pipeline. Furthermore, we depict several studies in peptide and protein design using GAN frameworks. Moreover, we outline the limitations in regard to the previous drug design and discovery studies using GAN models. Finally, we present a discussion of directions and challenges for future research.