Drug Design and Disease Diagnosis: The Potential of Deep Learning Models in Biology

Early prediction and detection enable reduced transmission of human diseases and provide healthcare professionals ample time to make subsequent diagnoses and treatment strategies. This, in turn, aids in saving more lives and results in lower medical costs. Designing small chemical molecules to treat fatal disorders is also urgently needed to address the high death rate of these diseases worldwide. A recent analysis of published literature suggested that deep learning (DL) based models apply more potential algorithms to hybrid databases of chemical data. Considering the above, we first discussed the concept of DL architectures and their applications in drug development and diagnostics in this review. Although DL-based approaches have applications in several fields, in the following sections of the article, we focus on recent developments of DL-based techniques in biology, notably in structure prediction, cancer drug development, COVID infection diagnostics, and drug repurposing strategies. Each review section summarizes several cutting-edge, recently developed DL-based techniques. Additionally, we introduced the approaches presented in our group, whose prediction accuracy is relatively comparable with current computational models. We concluded the review by discussing the benefits and drawbacks of DL techniques and outlining the future paths for data collecting and developing efficient computational models.