AI agents in drug discovery: applications and case studies

AI agents are emerging as transformative tools in drug discovery, with the ability to autonomously reason, act and learn through complicated research workflows. Building on large language models and specialized tools, these systems can integrate biomedical data, execute tasks, conduct experiments and iteratively refine hypotheses. We provide a conceptual overview of agentic AI architectures and illustrate their applications across key stages of drug discovery, including literature synthesis, automated protocol generation, toxicity prediction, small-molecule synthesis, drug repurposing and end-to-end decision-making. Early implementations demonstrate substantial gains in speed, reproducibility and scalability. We discuss the challenges related to data heterogeneity, system reliability, privacy, benchmarking and outline future directions toward technology in support of science and translation.