MADDIE: Multi-Agent Drug Discovery Engine
Organizations: Biomedical Informatics, The Ohio State University. · Computer Science and Engineering, The Ohio State University. · Medicinal Chemistry and Pharmacognosy, The Ohio State University. · Translational Data Analytics Institute, The Ohio State University.
Abstract
Drug discovery remains a resource-intensive and time-consuming process, involving billions of dollars and a decade of development to advance a drug to market. While many in silico tools have accelerated this process, operating them still demands substantial time, effort, and expertise from medicinal chemists. Autonomous systems built on Large Language Models (LLMs) have emerged as a promising solution, yet current designs limit their performance. Existing single-agent systems scale poorly to long-horizon, multi-step, and realistic tasks, whereas multi-agent systems typically execute predefined workflows that cannot capture the iterative, non-linear nature of a real drug discovery campaign. Here, we present MADDIE, a multi-agent drug discovery engine. It comprises a central agent, Orchestrator, and four specialized worker agents: HitIdentifier, LeadOptimizer, Synthesizer, and Evaluator, each representing a critical step in a drug discovery campaign. Under Orchestrator's orchestration and coordination, these worker agents are composed into flexible workflows, enabling MADDIE to adapt its strategy and navigate the drug discovery pipeline end-to-end. Across 50 protein targets, MADDIE produces molecules satisfying key property requirements and their synthesis routes, outperforming existing agentic systems, generative models, and general-purpose LLMs by a wide margin. Our analysis reveals how these agents collaborate and that MADDIE can employ different strategies across targets to achieve the campaign's goal, while still being efficient in time and tokens. Together, they demonstrate MADDIE as a low-cost, effective, and efficient autonomous engine for accelerating drug discovery. Code and dataset is available via https://github.com/ninglab/MADDIE.
Figures & tables
| Method | ||||||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| -6.53 | 0.36 | 5.35 | 0.51 | 0.71 | 0.96 | True | True | |
| Agents for Drug Discovery | ||||||||
| (ours) | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ |
| ( Averly et al., 2025 ) | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ | – | – | – | – | – |
| Prompt-to-Pill ( Vichentijevikj et al., 2026 ) | ✓ | ✓ | – | ✓ | – | ✓ | – | – |
| AgentD ( Ock et al., 2026 ) | – | ✓ | – | – | – | – | – | – |
| Method | \mathop{\textbf{N_{tout}}}\limits | \mathop{\textbf{N_{out}}}\limits | \mathop{\textbf{N_{sat}}}\limits | % | % | % | % | % | % | % | % | % |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Agents for Drug Discovery | ||||||||||||
| 50 | 100.0 | 100.0 | 100.0 | 100.0 | 100.0 | 100.0 | 100.0 | 100.0 | 100.0 | 100.0 | 100.0 | |
| 49 | 36.0 | 28.0 | 80.0 | 83.1 | 96.1 | 100.0 | 100.0 | 100.0 | 100.0 | 100.0 | 100.0 | |
| Prompt-to-Pill | 31 | 14.2 | 2.9 | 20.9 | 55.0 | 88.5 | 100.0 | 41.0 | 100.0 | 98.1 | 100.0 | 100.0 |
| AgentD | 35 | 44.2 | 44.2 | 100.0 | 100.0 | 100.0 | 100.0 | 100.0 | 100.0 | 100.0 | 100.0 | 100.0 |
| Generative Models for Drug Design | ||||||||||||
| Method | \mathop{\textbf{N_{tout}}}\limits | \mathop{\textbf{N_{out}}}\limits | \mathop{\textbf{N_{sat}}}\limits | % | % | \mathop{\textbf{N_{itm}}}\limits |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 50 | 100.0 | 100.0 | 100.0 | 100.0 | 1,043.8 | |
| w/o | 50 | 100.0 | 40.2 | 40.2 | 40.2 | 1,554.8 |
| w/o | 49 | 100.0 | 100.0 | 100.0 | 100.0 | 1,327.7 |
| w/o | 50 | 100.0 | 100.0 | 100.0 | 100.0 | 1,743.8 |
| \mathop{\textbf{N_{itm}}}\limits | Targets | Share (%) |
|---|---|---|
| 10 | 20.0 | |
| – | 18 | 36.0 |
| – | 9 | 18.0 |
| – | 8 | 16.0 |
| 5 | 10.0 |
| Metric | Cost | Action | Delegation per agent | ||||||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Time (h) | Out. token | Total | Process | Delegate | HI | LO | EV | SY | |||
| Average | 3.3 | 21,125 | 24.9 | 14.9 | 10.0 | 2.2 | 1.0 | 5.1 | 1.7 | ||
| Shortest (ADAMTS5) | 1.2 | 7,508 | 9 | 5 | 4 | 1 | 0 | 2 | 1 | ||
| Longest (HDAC8) | 11.6 | 30,448 | 44 | 38 | 6 | 1 | 1 | 3 | 1 | ||
| Worker agent | Input | Output | Tools |
|---|---|---|---|
| Target pocket . | Candidate molecules. | conDitar ( Gao et al., 2026 ) for SBDD; DiffSMol ( Chen et al., 2025 ) for LBDD; AutoDock ( Trott and Olson, 2010a ) for predicting binding affinity. | |
| Candidate molecules. | Property values. | UniDock ( Yu et al., 2023 ) , QED ( Bickerton et al., 2012 ) , SAScore ( Ertl and Schuffenhauer, 2009 ) , ADMET-AI ( Swanson et al., 2024 ) and Lilly filter ( Bruns and Watson, 2012 ) . | |
| Candidate molecules that fail one or more requirements. | Optimized candidate molecules. | GeLLMO-C ( Dey et al., 2025 ) ; MolOpt algorithms ( Gao et al., 2022 ) ; RDKit and -backed oracles for the target properties. | |
| Candidate molecules. | Synthesis routes or synthesizable analogs. | MEEA ∗ ( Zhao et al., 2024 ) and PrexSyn ( Luo and Coley, 2026 ) . |
Appendix figures & tables8 assets
Supplementary material from the paper’s appendix.
Appendix
| Gene name | PDB ID | Ligand ID | Disease category | Source | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| CD2020 | |||||
| ABCC8 | 6PZ9 | BJX | D | – | – |
| ABCD1 | 7VX8 | ATP | N | – | |
| ABO | 5BXC | DA8 | CV, I | – | |
| ACE | 3L3N | LSW | CV | – | |
| ACHE | 7D9O | H0L | A, N | – | – |
| Target | Associated FDA-approved drugs |
|---|---|
| ABCC8 | Glimepiride, Glipizide, Glyburide, Nateglinide, Repaglinide |
| ACE | Benazepril, Captopril, Enalapril, Enalaprilat, Fosinopril, Lisinopril, Moexipril, Perindopril, Quinapril, Ramipril, Trandolapril |
| ACHE | Benzgalantamine, Donepezil, Echothiophate, Galantamine, Neostigmine, Pralidoxime, Pyridostigmine, Rivastigmine |
| ADRB1 | Acebutolol, Atenolol, Betaxolol, Bisoprolol, Carteolol, Carvedilol, Dobutamine, Dopamine, Epinephrine, Esmolol, Isoproterenol, Labetalol, Landiolol, Levobunolol, Metoprolol, Nadolol, Nebivolol, Norepinephrine, Pindolol, Propafenone, Propranolol, Sotalol, Timolol |
| AKT1 | Capivasertib |
| BCHE | Rivastigmine |
| Pass rate | Requirements | FDA-approved drugs |
|---|---|---|
| % | 81.2 | |
| % | 88.0 | |
| % | 96.9 | |
| % | 91.1 | |
| % | 89.0 | |
| % | 81.7 |
| Method | Avg. Rank | |||||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| -6.530 | 0.360 | 5.350 | 0.510 | 0.710 | 0.960 | – | – | |
| Agents for Drug Discovery | ||||||||
| -7.897 | 0.646 | 3.563 | 0.217 | 0.224 | 0.535 | 0.864 | 6.3 | |
| -7.780 | 0.712 | 2.515 | 0.226 | 0.108 | 0.358 | 0.811 | 4.1 | |
| Prompt-to-Pill | -6.834 | 0.570 | 3.378 | 0.541 | 0.221 | 0.356 | 0.739 | 8.3 |
| AgentD | -8.223 | 0.702 | 2.861 | 0.221 | 0.217 | 0.542 | 0.693 | 6.1 |