Research Progress on Artificial Intelligence-Driven Drug-Target Interaction Prediction

Drug-target interaction (DTI) is fundamental to novel drug research and development (R &D), playing a critical role in elucidating drug mechanisms of action and improving the cost-effectiveness of drug discovery. Although China has seen rapid accumulation of drug-target resources in recent years, the industry still faces challenges such as a shortage of original targets and excessively high target concentration. The rapid advancement of artificial intelligence (AI) has provided an efficient technological pathway for DTI prediction, establishing it as a core tool for accelerating drug discovery. This paper systematically reviews the fundamental data support framework for DTI prediction tasks, elaborating in detail on three core data types— drug characterization, target characterization, and drug-target associations-as well as the classification and application boundaries of mainstream benchmark datasets tailored to different tasks within the field. On this basis, it comprehensively surveys the technological evolution of AI-driven DTI prediction, summarizing the core paradigms and technical advances of traditional machine learning and deep learning methods in a single-modality setting, alongside cutting-edge multimodal approaches that integrate two modalities (cross-subject/within-subject fusion) and three or more modalities for multidimensional information integration. Finally, this paper analyzes the current major challenges in data quality, model generalizability and interpretability, and real-world deployment, while also discussing future trends in standardized dataset construction, generative AI, and large-scale biomedical foundation models, aiming to provide a reference for both research and industrial applications in the AI-driven DTI prediction field.