Accelerating scientific discovery with Co-Scientist
Abstract
Abstract Scientific discovery is driven by scientists generating hypotheses for complex problems that undergo rigorous experimental validation. To augment this process, we introduce Co-Scientist, a multi-agent artificial intelligence (AI) system built on Gemini for structured scientific thinking and hypothesis generation. Co-Scientist aims to help scientists discover new original knowledge. Conditioned on their research objectives and previous scientific evidence, it formulates demonstrably novel research hypotheses for experimental verification. The system’s design involves agents continuously generating, critiquing and refining hypotheses accelerated by scaling test-time compute. Key contributions include (1) a multi-agent architecture with an asynchronous task execution framework for flexible compute scaling, and (2) a tournament evolution process for self-improving hypotheses generation. Automated evaluations show continued benefits of test-time compute scaling, improving hypothesis quality over time. Although this is a general-purpose system, we focus the validation in three biomedical applications: drug repurposing; novel-target discovery 1 ; and explaining mechanisms of antimicrobial resistance 2 . Specifically, Co-Scientist helped to identify new drug-repurposing candidates and synergistic combination therapies for acute myeloid leukaemia that were validated through in vitro experiments. These real-world validations demonstrate the potential of Co-Scientist to accelerate scientific discovery and usher in an era of AI-empowered scientists.
Article Details
Authors (51)
Juraj Gottweis
Wei-Hung Weng
Alexander Daryin
Tao Tu
Petar Sirkovic
Artiom Myaskovsky
Grzegorz Glowaty
Felix Weissenberger
Alessio Orlandi
Dan Popovici
Anil Palepu
Keran Rong
Ryutaro Tanno
Khaled Saab
Fan Zhang
Jacob Blum
Andrew Carroll
Kavita Kulkarni
Nenad Tomašev
Dina Zverinski
Ivor Rendulic
Elahe Vedadi
Florian Hasler
Luka Rimanic
Marina Boia
Ivan Budiselic
Ben Feinstein
Mathias Bellaiche
Tom Sheffer
Jan Freyberg
Jeremy Ratcliff
Ottavia Bertolli
Katherine Chou
Avinatan Hassidim
Burak Gokturk
Amin Vahdat
Yuan Guan
Vikram Dhillon
Eeshit Dhaval Vaishnav
Byron Lee
Tiago R. D. Costa
José R. Penadés
Gary Peltz
Yossi Matias
James Manyika
Demis Hassabis
Yunhan Xu
Pushmeet Kohli
Annalisa Pawlosky
Alan Karthikesalingam
Vivek Natarajan