Deep learning approaches for de novo drug design: An overview

De novo drug design is the process of generating novel lead compounds with desirable pharmacological and physiochemical properties. The application of deep learning (DL) in de novo drug design has become a hot topic, and many DL-based approaches have been developed for molecular generation tasks. Generally, these approaches were developed as per four frameworks: recurrent neural networks; encoder-decoder; reinforcement learning; and generative adversarial networks. In this review, we first introduced the molecular representation and assessment metrics used in DL-based de novo drug design. Then, we summarized the features of each architecture. Finally, the potential challenges and future directions of DL-based molecular generation were prospected.