Research advance in the drug target prediction based on chemoinformatics

The emerging of network pharmacology and polypharmacology forces the scientists to recognize and explore new mechanisms of existing drugs. The drug target prediction can play a key significance on the elucidation of the molecular mechanism of drugs and drug reposition. In this paper, we systematically review the existing approaches to the prediction of biological targets of small molecule based on chemoinformatics, including ligand-based prediction, receptor-based prediction and data mining-based prediction. We also depict the strength of these methods as well as their applications, and put forward their developing direction.