The Role of Big Data Analytics in Drug Discovery and Vaccine Development Against COVID-19

Abstract

Scientific studies related to information on possible treatments and vaccines have been growing with the development of the COVID-19 pandemic. The research databases are publicly available, which provides a solid resource in supporting the global research community. However, challenges remain in terms of searching the insightful information quickly for the purpose of finding the right treatments and vaccines in the current situation. Artificial intelligence technologies can help to build tools in order to search, rank, extract, and aggregate useful results from enormous databases. This chapter presents a systematic review for investigating current research in drug discovery and vaccine development for COVID-19 throughout protein structural basis analysis and visualization, machine learning- and deep learning-based models, and a big data-driven approach. The survey study indicates that applied big data and AI can generate new insights in support of the ongoing fight against COVID-19 in terms of developing new drugs and vaccines efficiently.