Finch

FutureHouse's Robin agent autonomously proposes drug repurposing candidates, validated in human cell experiments

FutureHouse, University of Oxford, and Fordham University released Robin, an open-source AI agent that autonomously identifies existing drugs that could treat a given disease by iteratively hypothesizing mechanisms, designing experiments, and ranking drug candidates using literature-search sub-agents. In a demonstration targeting dry age-related macular degeneration, Robin identified two drugs (Y-27632 and Ripasudil) that produced roughly 1.75–2x increases in RPE phagocytosis in human cell experiments. The pipeline uses GPT o4-mini for most language tasks and Claude 3.7 Sonnet for pairwise ranking, with human involvement limited to naming the disease and running lab experiments. The work represents a concrete, experimentally validated instance of agentic AI accelerating drug repurposing research.