Multidrug-resistant bacteria are a severe threat to public health. Conventional antibiotics are becoming increasingly ineffective as a result of resistance, and it is imperative to find new antibacterial strategies. Natural antimicrobials, known as host defence peptides or antimicrobial peptides, defend host organisms against microbes but most have modest direct antibiotic activity. Enhanced variants have been developed using straightforward design and optimization strategies and are being tested clinically. Here, we describe advanced computer-assisted design strategies that address the difficult problem of relating primary sequence to peptide structure, and are delivering more potent, cost-effective, broad-spectrum peptides as potential next-generation antibiotics.

Ever since the first automated de novo design techniques were conceived only 15 years ago, the computer-based design of hit and lead structure candidates has emerged as a complementary approach to high-throughput screening. Although many challenges remain, de novo design supports drug discovery projects by generating novel pharmaceutically active agents with desired properties in a cost- and time-efficient manner. In this review, we outline the various design concepts and highlight current developments in computer-based de novo design.

A chemically advanced template search (CATS) based on topological pharmacophore models has been developed as a technique for virtual screening. This technique has successfully identified novel potent Ca(2+) antagonists (such as 2) that have a similar activity to 1 (a known T-channel blocking agent) in a library of several hundred thousand compounds on the basis of a correlation vector representation.

arious concepts of 'artificial intelligence' (AI) have been successfully adopted for computer-assisted drug discovery in the past few years 1-3. This advance is mostly owed to the ability of deep learning algorithms, that is, artificial neural networks with multiple processing layers, to model complex nonlinear inputoutput relationships, and perform pattern recognition and feature extraction from low-level data representations. Certain deep learning models have been shown to match or even exceed the performance of the familiar existing machine learning and quantitative structure-activity relationship (QSAR) methods for drug discovery 4-6. Moreover, deep learning has boosted the potential and broadened the applicability of computer-assisted discovery, for example, in molecular design 7,8 , chemical synthesis planning 9,10 , protein structure prediction 11 and macromolecular target identification 12,13. The ability to capture intricate nonlinear relationships between input data (for example, chemical structure representations) and the associated output (for example, assay readout) often comes at the price of limited comprehensibility of the resulting model. While there have been efforts to explain QSARs in terms of algorithmic insights and molecular descriptor analysis 14-19 , deep neural network models notoriously elude immediate accessibility by the human mind 20. In medicinal chemistry in particular, the availability of 'rules of thumb' correlating biological effects with physicochemical properties underscores the willingness, in certain situations, to sacrifice accuracy in favour of models that better fit human intuition 21-23. Thus, blurring the lines between the 'two QSARs' 24 (that is, mechanistically interpretable versus highly accurate models) may be key to accelerated drug discovery with AI 25. Automated analysis of medical and chemical knowledge to extract and represent features in a human-intelligible format dates back to the 1990s 26,27 , but has been receiving increasing attention due to the re-emergence of neural networks in chemistry and healthcare. Given the current pace of AI in drug discovery and related fields, there will be an increased demand for methods that help us understand and interpret the underlying models. In an effort to mitigate the lack of interpretability of certain machine learning models, and to augment human reasoning and decision-making, 28 , attention has been drawn to explainable AI (XAI) approaches 29,30. Providing informative explanations alongside the mathematical models aims to (1) render the underlying decision-making process transparent ('understandable') 31 , (2) avoid correct predictions for the wrong reasons (the so-called clever Hans effect) 32 , (3) avert unfair biases or unethical discrimination 33 and (4) bridge the gap between the machine learning community and other scientific disciplines. In addition, effective XAI can help scientists navigate 'cognitive valleys' 28 , allowing them to hone their knowledge and beliefs on the investigated process 34. While the e...

Artificial neural networks had their first heyday in molecular informatics and drug discovery approximately two decades ago. Currently, we are witnessing renewed interest in adapting advanced neural network architectures for pharmaceutical research by borrowing from the field of "deep learning". Compared with some of the other life sciences, their application in drug discovery is still limited. Here, we provide an overview of this emerging field of molecular informatics, present the basic concepts of prominent deep learning methods and offer motivation to explore these techniques for their usefulness in computer-assisted drug discovery and design. We specifically emphasize deep neural networks, restricted Boltzmann machine networks and convolutional networks.