English

FROGENT: An End-to-End Full-process Drug Design Multi-Agent System

Biomolecules 2026-03-03 v2 Artificial Intelligence

Abstract

Drug discovery is a complex, multi-step pipeline that remains heavily dependent on manual, experience-driven operations; meanwhile, existing customized artificial intelligence tools are fragmented across web applications, desktop software, and code libraries, resulting in incompatible interfaces and inefficient, burdensome workflows. To overcome these challenges, we propose FROGENT, a full-process drug design multi-agent system that leverages the planning, reasoning, and tool-use capabilities of large language models (LLMs) to unify drug discovery within a closed-loop and autonomous framework. FROGENT is a collaborative multi-agent system comprising a central Orchestrate Agent for strategic workflow coordination and three distributed agents, Retrieve, Forge, and Gauge, that employ dynamic biochemical databases, extensible tool libraries, and task-specific computational models via the Model Context Protocol. This architecture enables end-to-end execution of complex drug discovery pipelines, covering target identification, small-molecule generation, peptide optimization, and retrosynthetic planning. Across eight benchmarks spanning core drug discovery tasks, FROGENT consistently outperforms six increasingly advanced ReAct-style agents. Case studies further demonstrate its practicality and generalization across real-world small-molecule and peptide design scenarios. Overall, FROGENT not only achieves substantial gains in efficiency and accuracy, but also demonstrates the potential of LLM-based agentic systems to autonomously orchestrate drug development pipelines, reducing, or even replacing, reliance on manual, experience-driven human intervention.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2508.10760,
  title  = {FROGENT: An End-to-End Full-process Drug Design Multi-Agent System},
  author = {Qihua Pan and Dong Xu and Qianwei Yang and Jenna Xinyi Yao and Sisi Yuan and Zexuan Zhu and Jianqiang Li and Junkai Ji},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2508.10760},
  year   = {2026}
}

Comments

37 pages, 20 figures

R2 v1 2026-07-01T04:50:09.971Z