MoLRSI is a recursive self‑improving AI agent designed for molecular discovery that optimizes both workflow and model architecture using persistent cross‑task memory. It refines its search policy based on workflow performance, refinement outcomes, and execution feedback, enabling continuous improvement. In antibiotic discovery, MoLRSI achieved a 15.9% experimental hit rate versus 8.7% for an expert‑led workflow, and in de novo peptide‑MHC binder design it produced eight validated hits with preferential binding, outperforming a baseline approach.
By Yikun Zhang, Xiwei Cheng, Mingze Yuan, Yu Zhang, Brian Shim, Aarti Krishnan, Daniel Rosen, Kunyang Sun, Yingze Wang, Zhenfeng Deng, Botao Yu, Bingxu Liu, David Liu, Tianyu Liu, Yuanqi Du, Nir Hacohen, James J. Collins, Wengong Jin
arXiv:2606. 00555v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Structure-based drug design increasingly employs LLM agents to iteratively refine ligands against a target pocket, yet a viable ligand must satisfy two often-conflicting objectives -- binding affinity and druggability -- which single optimization steps rarely improve together.
By Zaifei Yang, Weiyu Chen, Yaqing Wang, James Kwok
arXiv:2606. 19245v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Artificial intelligence (AI) agents promise to accelerate drug discovery by compressing interpretation and decision-making loops, but practical deployment requires trusted evaluation on realistic program decisions.
By Hannah Le, Ramesh Ramasamy, Alex Urrutia, Mahsa Yazdani, Tim Proctor, Kenny Workman
The study evaluates whether a portfolio of compact, semantically named descriptor blocks can match the performance of a 2048‑dimensional CheMeleon embedding in low‑data molecular assays. Using a fixed 11‑dimensional physicochemical base and greedily adding provenance‑screened blocks, the portfolio achieves a mean test AUC of 0.762 across nine ADME/Tox assays, comparable to CheMeleon’s 0.764 and better than Mordred’s 0.756. The results meet a predeclared pooled parity threshold but not all per‑assay thresholds, and further analysis confirms the competitiveness of the auditable representation while highlighting unresolved assay‑level differences.
By Yiqi Yao, Miquel Duran-Frigola
arXiv:2610.23791v1 Announce Type: new
Abstract: Computational drug discovery requires agents to compose scientific operations and adapt to changing evidence and constraints. Here we introduce DrugHar...
By Yuxing Chen, Zhisheng Zhang, Cheng Tang, Wei Li, Minghui Zhang, Ziyan Huang, Shaocong Wei, Jiawei Chen, Junru Hu, Hongze Zhu, Jianghan Shen, Min Cen, Xinyuan Zhu, Yaxue Zhao, Jubo Wang, Yuqiang Li, Chun-Mei Feng, Zongyuan Ge, Rui Su, Jie Xu, Yirong Chen, Xi Xu, Ming Hu
arXiv:2605.11221v2 Announce Type: replace-cross
Abstract: Predictive models in medicinal chemistry depend on structured assay data locked in primary publications. This bottleneck is acute in targeted...
By Yaochen Rao, Farzaneh Jalalypour, N. M. Anoop Krishnan, Roc\'io Mercado
The paper introduces AssayBench-Loop, a large benchmark of 1,389 CRISPR screens across five phenotype categories, and builds on it to develop AssayLoop, a sequential experimental design framework that combines a transformer-based acquisition policy (AssayFormer) trained on historical data with LLM-derived biological priors. AssayLoop achieves a 5.67‑fold enrichment over random selection, recovering 27.7% of hits after testing only about 5% of the library, and outperforms existing adaptive-design methods and standalone LLMs. The authors also present AssayLLM, extending the approach directly to an LLM via task‑specific post‑training, and show that performance improves with more historical training data and transfers to unseen phenotype categories.
By Carl Edwards, Edward De Brouwer, Xiner Li, Namkyeong Lee, Ehsan Hajiramezanali, Anne Biton, Sara Mostafavi, Gabriele Scalia
ARGUS is an evidence‑constrained framework that separates deterministic biological computation from large‑language‑model reasoning to interpret single nucleotide variants in noncoding regulatory regions. It uses 458 DNABERT‑based transcription factor binding models within a hypothesis‑directed loop where a planner selects evidence sources, a verifier interprets observations, and the investigation path adapts to uncertainty. In a case study of variant rs6983267, ARGUS generated divergent investigative trajectories for four transcription factors, demonstrating how real experimental data from ADASTRA, JASPAR, and ENCODE cCRE guide conclusions and how the LLM planner can reduce unnecessary tool calls.
By Pratik Dutta, Matthew B. Obusan, Max Chao, Rekha Sathian, Nimisha Papineni, Ramana V. Davuluri
AgentFold is a multi‑agent framework that treats protein‑folding model design as a closed‑loop search over executable code variants. Starting from the ESMFold codebase, the agents generate hypotheses, modify and debug code, evaluate model variants, and store both successes and failures in structured memory, guided by an MCTS‑style policy that allocates GPU resources. In an engineering‑scale experiment, AgentFold explored about 80 variants using 5,000 GPU‑hours and 170 million LLM tokens, improving the best lDDT score by 7.5% over independent Codex proposals and outperforming a random‑search baseline, while also uncovering empirical design patterns such as the benefits of early, soft, learnable priors.
By Mingquan Liu, Jiangyu Chen, Hanqun Cao, Xujun Zhang, Pengsen Ma, Xiangru Tang, Shuting Jin, Zhuo Yang, Tianfan Fu, Fang Wu, Xiangxiang Zeng
R-GroundBench is a new diagnostic benchmark for evaluating AI models on R‑group grounding in Markush molecular editing, derived from real pharmaceutical patents. It includes a Multiple‑Choice VQA track with varying difficulty and modality splits, as well as an open‑ended Generation track. Experiments show a large performance gap: models score over 90% on easy VQA but drop to 56–66% on hard VQA, and generation exact match stays below 20% (and under 8% with visual input).
By Xin Wang, Zichuan Ying, Xinna Lin, Junqi Zhang, Hanyi Xiong, Tianyu Gao, Hairong Zhang, Qixiang Hua, Botian Shi, Zhenhailong Wang, Kaicheng Yu
The paper introduces CELLAUDIT, a method for auditing whether inputs claimed to influence predictive models actually do so. By testing if an input can enter the computation, whether predictions depend on it, and if that dependence improves observed responses, the authors evaluate agent-generated predictors on a morphology‑transcriptomics benchmark (BBBC047). Their findings show that many models claim compound contributions that are not supported by the data, and that falsification‑guided revisions can recover genuine input effects while improving performance.
By Mengran Li, Bo Li, Chengyang Zhang, Yang Yan, Jinfeng Xu, Zhenchao Tang
arXiv:2610.16975v1 Announce Type: new
Abstract: Drug discovery remains a resource-intensive and time-consuming process, involving billions of dollars and a decade of development to advance a drug to...
By Ye Liu, Reza Averly, Avery Meyer, Frazier N. Baker, Ruoxi Gao, Daniel Adu-Ampratwum, Xia Ning