MARRVEL-MCP: An agentic interface for Mendelian disease discovery via tool-augmented context engineering

Variant interpretation in rare diseases requires navigating multiple genomic databases, each with strict input formats, while synthesizing heterogeneous evidence. This process creates significant barriers for non-experts and imposes a substantial cognitive burden on experienced specialists. These challenges are evident in tools such as model organism aggregated resources for rare variant exploration (MARRVEL), which require precise variant formatting (e.g., Human Genome Variation Society [HGVS] notation) and return complex, heterogeneous outputs. To address these usability barriers, we developed MARRVEL-MCP, a natural-language interface that enables large language models (LLMs) to perform end-to-end variant interpretation via structured tool access. This work demonstrates the impact of tool-augmented context engineering, the purposeful design of domain-aware tool environments and structured information scaffolding through executable function interfaces, on reshaping the role of model scale in genomics. MARRVEL-MCP equips LLMs with 44 tools spanning gene and variant utilities, pathogenicity databases, phenotype resources, expression atlases, ortholog data, and literature APIs. Without hard-coded workflows, LLMs infer which tools to invoke and in what sequence, performing named-entity recognition, identifier normalization, and multi-database synthesis from clinical queries. Using 100 expert-curated questions, lightweight models (3B-20B parameters) with MARRVEL-MCP matched or outperformed larger models without tool access. A 20B-parameter model (gpt-oss-20b) achieved a 94% pass rate, versus 41% without MARRVEL-MCP, approaching state-of-the-art proprietary performance. Although expert oversight remains essential and tool use adds cost, these results show that contextual guidance can compensate for limited model capacity. These findings establish context engineering as a core principle for biomedical AI and support scalable integration of LLMs with curated genomic resources.