Machine Learning for RNA-Targeting Drug Design

Targeting RNA with small molecules offers significant therapeutic potential. Machine learning could substantially accelerate preclinical drug discovery, from hit identification to lead optimization. Yet a limitation emerges: drug design machine learning models, designed for proteins, are not readily applicable to RNAs because of fundamental differences between RNAs and proteins in both structural characteristics and interactions with small molecules. RNA-specific approaches have consequently emerged, primarily focusing on binding site identification and virtual screening. In this review, we comprehensively compare machine learning tools for RNA-targeting drug design according to the tasks they address, their methodology and their relevance in RNA-specific contexts. As open challenges will catalyze new method development, we emphasize the need for standardized, drug design-specific evaluation approaches. We provide clear guidelines to establish these standards and present a benchmark assessing the ability of current machine learning models to predict specific drug-RNA interactions.