Individual & Collective Human Intelligence in Drug Design: Evaluating the Search Strategy

In recent years, individual and collective human intelligence, defined as the knowledge, skills, reasoning and intuition of individuals and groups, have been used in combination with computer algorithms to solve complex scientific problems. Such approach was successfully used in different research fields such as: structural biology, comparative genomics, macromolecular crystallography and RNA design. Herein we describe an attempt to use a similar approach in small-molecule drug discovery, specifically to drive search strategies of de novo drug design. This is assessed with a case study that consists of a series of public experiments in which participants had to explore the huge chemical space in silico to find desired molecules (e.g. drug candidates). The objectives of this case study are: assess human intelligence in chemical space exploration problems; compare the performance of individual and collective human intelligence; and contrast human and artificial intelligence achievements in de novo drug design. To our knowledge this is the first time that human intelligence is being evaluated for such a task in drug discovery and, of similar importance, compared to the performance of artificial intelligence (e.g. machine learning, genetic algorithms), giving first insights towards their differences and uniqueness.