Drug Design for Malaria with Artificial Intelligence (AI)

Malaria is a deadly disease caused by the plasmodium parasites. Approximately 210 million people get affected by malaria every year resulting in half a million deaths. Among several species of the parasite, Plasmodium falciparum is the primary cause of severe infection and death. Several drugs are available for malaria treatment in the market but plasmodium parasites have successfully developed resistance against many drugs over the years. This poses a serious threat to efficacy of the treatments and continuing discovery of new drug is necessary to tackle the situation, especially due to failure in designing an effective vaccine. People are now trying to design new drugs for malaria using AI technologies which can substantially reduce the time and cost required in classical drug discovery programs. In this chapter, we provide a comprehensive overview of a road map for several AI based computational techniques which can be implemented in a malaria drugs discovery program. Classical computers has limiting computing power. So, researchers are also trying to harness quantum machine learning to speed up the drug discovery processes.