AI-Driven Antiviral Natural Products Drug Development: A Technical Overview

Abstract

The emergence of viral pandemics and rapid pathogen evolution presents formidable challenges for conventional antiviral development, including prolonged timelines, high costs, and susceptibility to resistance mechanisms. Natural products offer promising antiviral potential through structural diversity and multi-target synergism, while their development faces critical bottlenecks in structural characterization, target identification, and synthetic optimization. Given the current situation, artificial intelligence (AI), particularly machine learning (ML) and deep learning (DL), is revolutionizing drug development by transforming data analysis and predictive modeling. This review explores artificial intelligence applications across the antiviral natural products drug development continuum, providing insights for AI-driven pharmaceutical research.