A Systematic Review of Deep Learning Methodologies Used in the Drug Discovery Process with Emphasis on In Vivo Validation

The discovery and development of new drugs are extremely long and costly processes. Recent progress in artificial intelligence has made a positive impact on the drug development pipeline. Numerous challenges have been addressed with the growing exploitation of drug-related data and the advancement of deep learning technology. Several model frameworks have been proposed to enhance the performance of deep learning algorithms in molecular design. However, only a few have had an immediate impact on drug development since computational results may not be confirmed experimentally. This systematic review aims to summarize the different deep learning architectures used in the drug discovery process and are validated with further in vivo experiments. For each presented study, the proposed molecule or peptide that has been generated or identified by the deep learning model has been biologically evaluated in animal models. These state-of-the-art studies highlight that even if artificial intelligence in drug discovery is still in its infancy, it has great potential to accelerate the drug discovery cycle, reduce the required costs, and contribute to the integration of the 3R (Replacement, Reduction, Refinement) principles. Out of all the reviewed scientific articles, seven algorithms were identified: recurrent neural networks, specifically, long short-term memory (LSTM-RNNs), Autoencoders (AEs) and their Wasserstein Autoencoders (WAEs) and Variational Autoencoders (VAEs) variants; Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs); Direct Message Passing Neural Networks (D-MPNNs); and Multitask Deep Neural Networks (MTDNNs). LSTM-RNNs were the most used architectures with molecules or peptide sequences as inputs.