Exploring Modularity of Agentic Systems for Drug Discovery

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Main Authors: van Weesep, Laura, Genheden, Samuel, Engkvist, Ola, Sjölund, Jens
Format: Preprint
Published: 2025
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_version_ 1866912547174612992
author van Weesep, Laura
Genheden, Samuel
Engkvist, Ola
Sjölund, Jens
author_facet van Weesep, Laura
Genheden, Samuel
Engkvist, Ola
Sjölund, Jens
contents Large-language models (LLMs) and agentic systems present exciting opportunities to accelerate drug discovery. In this study, we examine the modularity of LLM-based agentic systems for drug discovery, i.e., whether parts of the system such as the LLM and type of agent are interchangeable, a topic that has received limited attention in drug discovery. We compare the performance of different LLMs and the effectiveness of tool-calling agents versus code-generating agents. Our case study, comparing performance in orchestrating tools for chemistry and drug discovery using an LLM-as-a-judge score, shows that Claude-3.5-Sonnet, Claude-3.7-Sonnet and GPT-4o outperform alternative language models such as Llama-3.1-8B, Llama-3.1-70B, GPT-3.5-Turbo, and Nova-Micro. Although we confirm that code-generating agents outperform the tool-calling ones on average, we show that this is highly question- and model-dependent. Furthermore, the impact of replacing system prompts is dependent on the question and model, underscoring that even in this particular domain one cannot just replace components of the system without re-engineering. Our study highlights the necessity of further research into the modularity of agentic systems to enable the development of reliable and modular solutions for real-world problems.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2506_22189
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Exploring Modularity of Agentic Systems for Drug Discovery
van Weesep, Laura
Genheden, Samuel
Engkvist, Ola
Sjölund, Jens
Machine Learning
Computation and Language
Multiagent Systems
Large-language models (LLMs) and agentic systems present exciting opportunities to accelerate drug discovery. In this study, we examine the modularity of LLM-based agentic systems for drug discovery, i.e., whether parts of the system such as the LLM and type of agent are interchangeable, a topic that has received limited attention in drug discovery. We compare the performance of different LLMs and the effectiveness of tool-calling agents versus code-generating agents. Our case study, comparing performance in orchestrating tools for chemistry and drug discovery using an LLM-as-a-judge score, shows that Claude-3.5-Sonnet, Claude-3.7-Sonnet and GPT-4o outperform alternative language models such as Llama-3.1-8B, Llama-3.1-70B, GPT-3.5-Turbo, and Nova-Micro. Although we confirm that code-generating agents outperform the tool-calling ones on average, we show that this is highly question- and model-dependent. Furthermore, the impact of replacing system prompts is dependent on the question and model, underscoring that even in this particular domain one cannot just replace components of the system without re-engineering. Our study highlights the necessity of further research into the modularity of agentic systems to enable the development of reliable and modular solutions for real-world problems.
title Exploring Modularity of Agentic Systems for Drug Discovery
topic Machine Learning
Computation and Language
Multiagent Systems
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.22189