BioDiscoveryAgent: An AI Agent for Designing Genetic Perturbation Experiments

Fuente: arXiv
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Main Authors: Roohani, Yusuf, Lee, Andrew, Huang, Qian, Vora, Jian, Steinhart, Zachary, Huang, Kexin, Marson, Alexander, Liang, Percy, Leskovec, Jure
Format: Preprint
Published: 2024
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author Roohani, Yusuf
Lee, Andrew
Huang, Qian
Vora, Jian
Steinhart, Zachary
Huang, Kexin
Marson, Alexander
Liang, Percy
Leskovec, Jure
author_facet Roohani, Yusuf
Lee, Andrew
Huang, Qian
Vora, Jian
Steinhart, Zachary
Huang, Kexin
Marson, Alexander
Liang, Percy
Leskovec, Jure
contents Agents based on large language models have shown great potential in accelerating scientific discovery by leveraging their rich background knowledge and reasoning capabilities. In this paper, we introduce BioDiscoveryAgent, an agent that designs new experiments, reasons about their outcomes, and efficiently navigates the hypothesis space to reach desired solutions. We demonstrate our agent on the problem of designing genetic perturbation experiments, where the aim is to find a small subset out of many possible genes that, when perturbed, result in a specific phenotype (e.g., cell growth). Utilizing its biological knowledge, BioDiscoveryAgent can uniquely design new experiments without the need to train a machine learning model or explicitly design an acquisition function as in Bayesian optimization. Moreover, BioDiscoveryAgent, using Claude 3.5 Sonnet, achieves an average of 21% improvement in predicting relevant genetic perturbations across six datasets, and a 46% improvement in the harder task of non-essential gene perturbation, compared to existing Bayesian optimization baselines specifically trained for this task. Our evaluation includes one dataset that is unpublished, ensuring it is not part of the language model's training data. Additionally, BioDiscoveryAgent predicts gene combinations to perturb more than twice as accurately as a random baseline, a task so far not explored in the context of closed-loop experiment design. The agent also has access to tools for searching the biomedical literature, executing code to analyze biological datasets, and prompting another agent to critically evaluate its predictions. Overall, BioDiscoveryAgent is interpretable at every stage, representing an accessible new paradigm in the computational design of biological experiments with the potential to augment scientists' efficacy.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2405_17631
institution arXiv
publishDate 2024
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle BioDiscoveryAgent: An AI Agent for Designing Genetic Perturbation Experiments
Roohani, Yusuf
Lee, Andrew
Huang, Qian
Vora, Jian
Steinhart, Zachary
Huang, Kexin
Marson, Alexander
Liang, Percy
Leskovec, Jure
Artificial Intelligence
Computational Engineering, Finance, and Science
Multiagent Systems
Agents based on large language models have shown great potential in accelerating scientific discovery by leveraging their rich background knowledge and reasoning capabilities. In this paper, we introduce BioDiscoveryAgent, an agent that designs new experiments, reasons about their outcomes, and efficiently navigates the hypothesis space to reach desired solutions. We demonstrate our agent on the problem of designing genetic perturbation experiments, where the aim is to find a small subset out of many possible genes that, when perturbed, result in a specific phenotype (e.g., cell growth). Utilizing its biological knowledge, BioDiscoveryAgent can uniquely design new experiments without the need to train a machine learning model or explicitly design an acquisition function as in Bayesian optimization. Moreover, BioDiscoveryAgent, using Claude 3.5 Sonnet, achieves an average of 21% improvement in predicting relevant genetic perturbations across six datasets, and a 46% improvement in the harder task of non-essential gene perturbation, compared to existing Bayesian optimization baselines specifically trained for this task. Our evaluation includes one dataset that is unpublished, ensuring it is not part of the language model's training data. Additionally, BioDiscoveryAgent predicts gene combinations to perturb more than twice as accurately as a random baseline, a task so far not explored in the context of closed-loop experiment design. The agent also has access to tools for searching the biomedical literature, executing code to analyze biological datasets, and prompting another agent to critically evaluate its predictions. Overall, BioDiscoveryAgent is interpretable at every stage, representing an accessible new paradigm in the computational design of biological experiments with the potential to augment scientists' efficacy.
title BioDiscoveryAgent: An AI Agent for Designing Genetic Perturbation Experiments
topic Artificial Intelligence
Computational Engineering, Finance, and Science
Multiagent Systems
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2405.17631