A Framework for Autonomous AI-Driven Drug Discovery
Journal:
bioRxiv
Published Date:
Feb 26, 2026
Abstract
The exponential increase in biomedical data offers unprecedented opportunities for drug discovery, yet overwhelms traditional data analysis methods, limiting the pace of new drug development. Here we introduce a framework for autonomous artificial intelligence (AI)-driven drug discovery that integrates knowledge graphs with large language models (LLMs). It is capable of planning and carrying out automated drug discovery programs at a massive scale while providing details of its research strategy, progress, and all supporting data. At the heart of this framework lies the focal graph - a novel construct that harnesses centrality algorithms to distill vast, noisy datasets into concise, transparent, data-driven hypotheses. We demonstrate that even small-scale applications of this highly scalable approach can yield novel, transparent insights relevant to multiple stages of the drug discovery process, including chemical structure-based target prediction, and present the implementation of a system which autonomously plans and executes a multi-step target discovery workflow.
