Reinforcement Learning for Personalized Drug Discovery and Design for Complex Diseases: A Systems Pharmacology Perspective
This is a survey paper, so it is incremental, summarizing existing work without presenting new results.
The paper reviews reinforcement learning methods for drug design, highlighting their potential to address untreatable complex diseases through personalized therapies, but notes that new strategies are needed for systems pharmacology-oriented approaches.
Many multi-genic systemic diseases such as neurological disorders, inflammatory diseases, and the majority of cancers do not have effective treatments yet. Reinforcement learning powered systems pharmacology is a potentially effective approach to design personalized therapies for untreatable complex diseases. In this survey, state-of-the-art reinforcement learning methods and their latest applications to drug design are reviewed. The challenges on harnessing reinforcement learning for systems pharmacology and personalized medicine are discussed. Potential solutions to overcome the challenges are proposed. In spite of successful application of advanced reinforcement learning techniques to target-based drug discovery, new reinforcement learning strategies are needed to address systems pharmacology-oriented personalized de novo drug design.