MolAgent: Biomolecular Property Estimation in the Agentic Era

The advent of agentic AI systems is leading to significant transformations across scientific and technological domains. Advances in large language models (LLMs), reasoning capabilities, and integration with external tools have ushered in a new era where agentic AI systems can autonomously perform computational tasks that were traditionally carried out by humans. Computer-aided drug design (CADD)─a multifaceted process encompassing complex, interdependent tasks─stands to benefit profoundly from these advancements. However, one of the key challenges in enabling agentic systems to autonomously take over tasks in CADD is constructing models for property estimation that match the quality and reliability of those developed by human experts. As this is not currently straightforward, this capability represents a major bottleneck for fully realizing the potential of autonomous pipelines in drug discovery. We present here MolAgent, a system-agnostic agentic AI framework designed for high-fidelity modeling of molecular properties in early-stage drug discovery. MolAgent autonomously implements expert-level pipelines for both classification and regression, empowering agentic systems to efficiently construct and deploy models. With integrated automated feature engineering, robust model selection, advanced ensemble methodologies, and comprehensive validation frameworks, MolAgent ensures optimal accuracy and model robustness. The platform seamlessly accepts 2D and 3D structural data for ligands and receptors and harmonizes traditional molecular descriptors with advanced deep learning features extracted from pretrained 2D and 3D encoders. Ultimately, the platform's fully automated, end-to-end workflow is designed for seamless agentic execution. Adherence to the Model Context Protocol (MCP) guarantees interoperability with diverse agentic AI infrastructures, ensuring flexible integration into complex, future discovery pipelines.

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Publication Details

Journal
Journal of Chemical Information and Modeling
Published
2025-10-16
DOI
https://doi.org/10.1021/acs.jcim.5c01938
Citations
1
Primary Topic
Computational Drug Discovery Methods
Type
article
Field-Weighted Citation Impact
1.50
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article

MolAgent: Biomolecular Property Estimation in the Agentic Era

Sairam Menon, Hugo Ceulemans, Gary Tresadern, Joris Tavernier et al.
1 citations
Journal of Chemical Information and Modeling
Computational Drug Discovery Methods
1.50
article

MolAgent: Biomolecular Property Estimation in the Agentic Era

Sairam Menon, Hugo Ceulemans, Gary Tresadern, Joris Tavernier, Roy Aerts, Natalia Dyubankova, Hans De Winter, Dries Van Rompaey, Marvin Steijaert, Mazen Ahmad, José Carlos Gómez-Tamayo, Jörg K. Wegner
article en
1 citations

Abstract

The advent of agentic AI systems is leading to significant transformations across scientific and technological domains. Advances in large language models (LLMs), reasoning capabilities, and integration with external tools have ushered in a new era where agentic AI systems can autonomously perform computational tasks that were traditionally carried out by humans. Computer-aided drug design (CADD)─a multifaceted process encompassing complex, interdependent tasks─stands to benefit profoundly from these advancements. However, one of the key challenges in enabling agentic systems to autonomously take over tasks in CADD is constructing models for property estimation that match the quality and reliability of those developed by human experts. As this is not currently straightforward, this capability represents a major bottleneck for fully realizing the potential of autonomous pipelines in drug discovery. We present here MolAgent, a system-agnostic agentic AI framework designed for high-fidelity modeling of molecular properties in early-stage drug discovery. MolAgent autonomously implements expert-level pipelines for both classification and regression, empowering agentic systems to efficiently construct and deploy models. With integrated automated feature engineering, robust model selection, advanced ensemble methodologies, and comprehensive validation frameworks, MolAgent ensures optimal accuracy and model robustness. The platform seamlessly accepts 2D and 3D structural data for ligands and receptors and harmonizes traditional molecular descriptors with advanced deep learning features extracted from pretrained 2D and 3D encoders. Ultimately, the platform's fully automated, end-to-end workflow is designed for seamless agentic execution. Adherence to the Model Context Protocol (MCP) guarantees interoperability with diverse agentic AI infrastructures, ensuring flexible integration into complex, future discovery pipelines.

Journal of Chemical Information and ModelingVol. 65(20)
Johnson & Johnson (United States) (US), University of Antwerp (BE), Johnson & Johnson (Israel) (IL), Pharmaceutical Biotechnology (Czechia) (CZ), Johnson & Johnson (Brazil) (BR)
Openalex Percentile: Top 12%
Computational Drug Discovery Methods
1.50
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