Generative topographic mapping in drug design

This is a review article of Generative Topographic Mapping (GTM) – a non-linear dimensionality reduction technique producing generative 2D maps of high-dimensional vector spaces – and its specific applications in Drug Design (chemical space cartography, compound library design and analysis, virtual screening, pharmacological profiling, de novo drug design, conformational space & docking interaction cartography, etc.) Written by chemoinformaticians for potential users among medicinal chemists and biologists, the article purposely avoids all underlying mathematics. First, the GTM concept is intuitively explained, based on the strong analogies with the rather popular Self-Organizing Maps (SOMs), which are well established library analysis tools. GTM is basically a fuzzy-logics-based generalization of SOMs. The second part of the review, some of published GTM applications in drug design are briefly revisited.