The process of drug design and discovery demands several man years and huge investment. Computer-aided drug design (CADD) technique is an aid to speed up the drug discovery process. De novo drug design, a CADD technique to identify drug-like novel chemical structures from a huge chemical search space, helps to find new drugs by the optimization of multiple pharmaceutically relevant parameters required for a successful drug. As the search space is very large in the case of de novo drug design, evolutionary algorithm (EA), a soft computing technique can be used to find an optimal solution, which in this case is a novel drug. In this paper, various EA techniques used in de novo drug design tools are surveyed and analyzed in detail, with particular emphasis on the computational aspects. 
Evolutionary algorithms for de novo drug design – A survey