Efficient and enhanced sampling of drug‐like chemical space for virtual screening and molecular design using modern machine learning methods
Abstract:
Drug design involves the process of identifying and designing novel molecules that have desirable properties and bind well to a given target receptor. Typically, such molecules are identified by screening large chemical libraries for desirable physicochemical properties and binding strength with the target protein. This traditional approach, however, has severe limitations as exhaustively screening every molecule in known chemical libraries is computationally infeasible. Furthermore, currently available molecular libraries are only a minuscule part of the entire set of possible drug‐like molecular structures (drug‐like chemical space). In this review, we discuss how the former limitation is addressed by modeling virtual screening as a search space problem and how these endeavors utilize machine learning to reduce the number of required computational experiments to identify top candidates. We follow that up by …