Autonomous biomedical research with an artificial intelligence agent
Abstract
Biomedical research is increasingly constrained by repetitive, fragmented workflows that slow discovery. We introduce Biomni, a general-purpose biomedical artificial intelligence agent that autonomously executes diverse research tasks. To map the biomedical action space, Biomni’s action-discovery agent mines tools, databases, and protocols from thousands of publications across 25 domains, building a unified agentic environment. Its general-purpose architecture integrates large language model reasoning with retrieval-augmented planning and code-based execution, dynamically composing workflows without predefined templates. Systematic benchmarking shows strong generalization across heterogeneous tasks—causal gene prioritization, drug repurposing, rare-disease diagnosis, microbiome analysis, and molecular cloning—without task-specific tuning. Real-world case studies demonstrate Biomni interpreting multi-modal datasets, optimizing protein stability, orchestrating wet-lab instruments, and generating experimentally testable protocols. Biomni envisions artificial intelligence augmenting human scientists and accelerating discovery.
Article Details
Journal Info
Science
American Association for the Advancement of Science
Authors (28)
Kexin Huang
Serena Zhang
Department of Computer Science, Stanford University School of Engineering, Stanford, CA, USA.
Hanchen Wang
Department of Computer Science, Stanford University School of Engineering, Stanford, CA, USA.
Yuanhao Qu
Phylo, Inc., South San Francisco, CA, USA.
Yingzhou Lu
Department of Genetics, Stanford University School of Medicine, Stanford, CA, USA.
Ryan Li
Department of Computer Science, Stanford University School of Engineering, Stanford, CA, USA.
Yusuf Roohani
Lin Qiu
Paul G. Allen School of Computer Science and Engineering, University of Washington, Seattle, WA, USA.
Shiyi Cao
Department of EECS, University of California, Berkeley, CA, USA.
Gavin Li
Department of Computer Science, Stanford University School of Engineering, Stanford, CA, USA.
Junze Zhang
Department of Pathology, Stanford University School of Medicine, Stanford, CA, USA.
Di Yin
Department of Pathology, Stanford University School of Medicine, Stanford, CA, USA.
Rick Wierenga
Retro Bioscience, Redwood City, CA, USA.
Deniz Kavi
Sherry Liu
Tamarind Bio, South San Francisco, CA, USA.
Tianwei She
Phylo, Inc., South San Francisco, CA, USA.
Shruti Marwaha
Jennefer N. Carter
Department of Medicine, Stanford University School of Medicine, Stanford, CA, USA.
Xin Zhou
Matthew T. Wheeler
Jonathan A. Bernstein
Mengdi Wang
Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, Princeton University, Princeton, NJ, USA.
Peng He
Department of Pathology, University of California San Francisco, San Francisco, CA, USA.
Jingtian Zhou
Michael P. Snyder
Le Cong
Department of Pathology, Stanford University School of Medicine, Stanford, CA, USA.
Aviv Regev
Jure Leskovec