Over the past decades, peptide as a therapeutic candidate has received increasing attention in
drug discovery, especially for antimicrobial peptides (AMPs), anticancer peptides (ACPs) and antiinflammatory
peptides (AIPs). It is considered that the peptides can regulate various complex diseases
which are previously untouchable. In recent years, the critical problem of antimicrobial resistance drives
the pharmaceutical industry to look for new therapeutic agents. Compared to organic small drugs, peptide-
based therapy exhibits high specificity and minimal toxicity. Thus, peptides are widely recruited in
the design and discovery of new potent drugs. Currently, large-scale screening of peptide activity with
traditional approaches is costly, time-consuming and labor-intensive. Hence, in silico methods, mainly
machine learning approaches, for their accuracy and effectiveness, have been introduced to predict the
peptide activity. In this review, we document the recent progress in machine learning-based prediction
of peptides which will be of great benefit to the discovery of potential active AMPs, ACPs and AIPs.
How can we improve peptide drug discovery? Learning from the past