Artificial intelligence (AI) is transforming the fight against infectious diseases and antimicrobial resistance (AMR), a global public health crisis responsible for 1.27 million direct deaths in 2019. Traditional drug development is often too slow and inefficient, taking 2-5 years and struggling to counter rapidly evolving resistance and bottlenecks like high toxicity in antiviral and antifungal therapies. AI provides a revolutionary solution by accelerating pathogen evolution prediction, enabling new target discovery, and facilitating efficient compound design and optimization. This technology aims to drastically compress the development cycle to 3-6 months by focusing on key applications like phenotype-driven target identification and validation and targeted molecule design and lead compound optimization.
Commentary/editorial
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Artificial Intelligence Revolutionizes Anti-Infective Drug Discovery: From Target Identification to Lead Optimization
16-Oct-2025
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.