Artificial Intelligence Assisted Drug Research and Development

Artificial Intelligence, abbreviated as AI, is described as a collection of technologies that work together to allow machines to discern, interpret, take action, and acquire knowledge with human level of intelligence. The AI domain includes technologies such as natural language processing (NLP) and machine learning (ML). Each of these is on its separate route of development and, when combined with datasets, analytics, and computerization, may assist organisations in achieving their objectives, whether it's enhancing customer service or improving supply chain. The pipeline of the development of novel drugs is quite extensive and costly apart from being complicated. On average, this entire process requires around 12 years costing approximately 2.6 billion USD. In this age of computational power, AI-based techniques are used in almost all of the steps during the process of discovering and developing drugs. AI has been able to reduce the time requirement and amount of money involved in this process thus expediting the entire procedure of new pharmaceutical inventions. In this manuscript, we have discussed some of the major applications of AI in the pharmaceutical sector. Tools that are employed to forecast the toxicity of drugs and how some of them, for example - Toxtree, ADMET, ProTox etc. have been used by researchers in the drug discovery process, have also been talked about. Further we have mentioned how AI is proving to be a powerful tool in the fight against the COVID-19 pandemic, for example, in the detection of the SARS-Co V -2 virus, development of vaccines, genomics etc. In addition to this, we have discussed about the manner in which the penetration of AI-based companies into the pharmaceutical field has resulted in some notable outcomes, for instance - prediction of the 3-dimensional structure of proteins by DeepMind's AlphaFold2, determination of new drug contender for kidney fibrosis by Insilico Medicine's Chemistry42 etc. Furthermore, we have stated the propitious future that AI is expected to bring about in the pharma world with a special focus on drug development.