Google has created an AI-powered lab assistant that will help scientists speed up biomedical research and develop specialized applications based on advanced technologies. The new AI assistant (AI Coscientist) can identify gaps in researchers’ knowledge and suggest new ideas that can speed up the process of scientific discovery.
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Tech companies are now spending billions of dollars on AI models and products, hoping that these technologies can transform industries from health care to energy to education. “With our project, we’re trying to figure out whether technologies like our AI assistant can give researchers superpowers,” said Alan Karthikesalingam, a senior clinical scientist at Google.
AI Coscientist works using several AI agents that simulate the scientific process: one specializes in generating ideas, while others specialize in reviewing, critiquing, and reviewing them. The AI model is able to extract information from scientific articles and specialized databases that are freely available. It then analyzes the data and generates a ranked list of suggestions with explanations and links to sources.
Early tests of Google’s new tool with experts from Stanford University, Imperial College London, and Houston Methodist Hospital have shown that it can generate promising scientific hypotheses. AI Coscientist was able to identify drugs that could be repurposed to treat liver fibrosis, a serious disease that causes scar tissue to form. The AI assistant suggested two types of drugs that scientists confirmed helped treat the disease.
AI Coscientist also managed to come to the same conclusions about the new gene transfer mechanism as the Imperial researchers in their closed scientific papers. The results obtained by the scientists were not publicly available, as they were under peer review in a leading scientific journal. Google’s tool spent only a few days on the study, while the university team of scientists worked on it for several years.
«“We think this is a tool that could change the way we do science,” said José Penadés, a professor in the Department of Infectious Diseases and one of the researchers who discovered the gene transfer mechanism. Tools like the new Google AI Coscientist could help researchers stay up to date with the latest discoveries in their fields, said Jakob Foerster, an associate professor at the University of Oxford.
Earlier, Google’s DeepMind lab unveiled a new version of its AlphaFold AI model, which predicts the shape and behavior of proteins. OpenAI, Perplexity, German drugmaker BioNTech and its London-based subsidiary InstaDeep have also recently launched their own AI research tools.