Demonstrating end-to-end scientific discovery with Robin: a multi-agent system

Summary

Today, we announce the first discovery made by Robin, our multi-agent system for automating scientific research. Read the preprint here: https://arxiv.org/abs/2505.13400 Robin code, data and full agent trajectories will be released Tuesday 5/27FutureHouse's mission is to automate scientific discovery. Until now, we've released specialized AI agents to automate individual aspects of the discovery process: Crow, Falcon, and Owl for literature search and synthesis; Phoenix for chemical synthesis design; and Finch for complex data analysis.Today, we are excited to announce a significant breakthrough: by integrating these agents into a unified system named Robin, we've been able to automate the key intellectual steps of the entire scientific process and achieve our first AI-generated discovery. Robin is a workflow that orchestrates Crow, Falcon, and Finch to propose and pre-clinically validate novel treatments for any human disease. We applied Robin to identify ripasudil, a Rho-kinase (ROCK) inhibitor clinically used to treat glaucoma, as a novel therapeutic candidate for dry age-related macular degeneration (dAMD), a leading cause of irreversible blindness worldwide. How Robin Made Its First DiscoveryRobin made this discovery through an iterative cycle of hypothesis generation, experimental design, and data analysis:Initial Hypothesis: Robin used Crow to conduct a broad literature review, and hypothesized that enhancing retinal pigment epithelium (RPE) phagocytosis could provide therapeutic benefit for dAMD. Robin then used Falcon to evaluate a set of candidate molecules that might be able to do this, and we tested ten of them in the lab. Using Finch, Robin then analyzed the data from these experiments to find that the ROCK inhibitor Y-27632 augmented RPE phagocytosis in cell culture. Mechanism Investigation: Robin next proposed an RNA-sequencing experiment to determine if Y-27632 was inducing gene expression changes that might explain the increased phagocytosis of RPE ...