De Novo Drug Design Using Artificial Intelligence Applied on SARS-CoV-2 Viral Proteins ASYNT-GAN
Computer-assisted de novo design of natural product mimetics offers a viable strategy to reduce synthetic efforts and obtain natural-product-inspired bioactive small molecules, but suffers from several limitations. Deep learning techniques can help address these shortcomings. We propose the generation of synthetic molecule structures that optimizes the binding affinity to a target. To achieve this, we leverage important advancements in deep learning. Our approach generalizes to systems beyond the source system and achieves the generation of complete structures that optimize the binding to a target unseen during training. Translating the input sub-systems into the latent space permits the ability to search for similar structures, and the sampling from the latent space for generation.