After examining the results of thousands of clinical trials, a swarm of AI agents suggested that a protein that dampens immune responses could be the target for a promising treatment for lung cancer.Credit: Eoneren/Getty The Virtual Biotech comprises as many as 37,000 agents ' AI systems that autonomously interact with large language models (LLMs) or with each other and are capable of performing multistep tasks. It uncovered a molecular signal that could help to predict clinical-trial success. And with some human oversight, it identified a promising lung-cancer treatment. "We want to see how far these agent teams of AI scientists can help us to really accelerate drug discovery and development,' says James Zou, a computer scientist at Stanford University in California who led the effort. But other scientists note that the Virtual Biotech has not been vetted in the crucible of real-world drug discovery, and its predictions were not validated through experiments, let alone clinical...
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