Alex van Grootel

Today, we’re announcing the first major discovery made by our AI Scientist with the lab in the loop: a promising new treatment for dry AMD, a major cause of blindness. Our agents generated the hypotheses, designed the experiments, analyzed the data, iterated, even made figures for the paper. The resulting manuscript is a first-of-a-kind in the natural sciences, in which everything that needed to be done to write the paper was done by AI agents, apart from actually conducting the physical experiments in the lab and writing the final manuscript. We are also introducing Robin, the first multi-agent system that fully automates the in-silico components of scientific discovery, which made this discovery. This is the first time that we are aware of that hypothesis generation, experimentation, and data analysis have been joined up in closed loop, and is the beginning of a massive acceleration in the pace of scientific discovery that will be driven by these agents. We will be open-sourcing the code and data next week. Robin is a multi-agent system that uses Crow, Falcon, and Finch, the agents on our platform, to generate novel hypotheses, plan experiments, and analyze data. We asked Robin to find a new treatment for dry age-related macular degeneration. Robin considered the disease mechanisms associated with dry AMD, proposed a specific experimental assay that could be used to evaluate hypotheses in the wet lab, and proposed specific molecules we could test in that assay. We tested the molecules and gave it the resulting data, which it analyzed before proposing more experiments. In the end, it identified Ripasudil, a Rho Kinase inhibitor (ROCK inhibitor) that is approved in Japan for several other diseases, which seems very promising as potential treatment for dry AMD. It also identified specific molecular mechanisms that might underlie the effects of Ripasudil in RPE cells, from an RNA sequencing experiment it proposed. To be clear, no one has proposed using ROCK inhibitors to treat dry AMD in the literature before, as far as we can find, and I think it would have been very difficult for us to come up with this hypothesis without the agents. We have also run the proposed treatment by several experts in AMD, who confirm that it is interesting and novel. Moreover, this project was fast: with Robin in hand, the entire project took about 10 weeks, which is way shorter than it would have taken if we had been doing all of the in-silico components ourselves. Important caveats: We are real biologists at FutureHouse, so I want to be clear that although the discovery here is exciting, we are not claiming that we have cured dry AMD. Fully validating this hypothesis as a treatment for dry AMD will take human trials, which will take much longer. Also, this discovery is cool, but it is not yet a "move 37"-style discovery. At the current rate of progress, I'm sure we will get to that level soon. Congratulations to the team. Congratulations in particular to Robin, which generated the hypotheses, proposed the experiments, analyzed the data and generated the figures. And major congratulations also to the human team, which built Robin: @MichaelaThinks, @agreeb66, @benjamin0chang, @ludomitch, Mo Razzak, Kiki Szostkiewicz, and Angela Yiu.