Papers for

pharmaceutical research teams

Papers whose findings have a practical use for this group, as judged from the abstract. Open a paper to read what it means in practice.

Deep learning predicts patient drug responses from single cell data

scDEFT: A deep learning framework for drug-effect prediction and counterfactual reasoning

Abstract: Longitudinal single cell atlases now capture matched pre treatment and post treatment states from responders and non responders, presenting an opportunity to mechanistically explain why two patients on the same drug diverge. We introduce scDEFT (single cell Drug EFfect Transducer), which treats a drug as a conditioning operator on cell representations, enabling prediction and explanation. In scDEFT, feature wise linear modulation produces drug conditioned cell latents, learned under abundant per cell supervision and then frozen. Two independent heads aggregate those latents over shared transcriptional neighborhoods to predict drug induced state change and responder status. A backward stage ranks the latent dimensions by how strongly they separate responders from non responders and maps them to genes under a cell composition control. On a harmonized inflammatory bowel disease atlas of 1.16 million cells, three cohorts and two drug classes, scDEFT predicts state change at 45% of the baseline to reproducibility ceiling headroom and stratifies responders before treatment at AUROC 0.70, where standard predictors remain at chance. These predictions and the drivers behind them support target and co target nomination, patient stratification, and counterfactual prediction of unseen drug cohort effects.

Wed 9 SeptMachine Learning
The gist
Treatments can affect patients differently, and understanding why is important for better medicine. The authors introduce scDEFT, a deep learning tool that learns how drugs change individual cells, helping predict how patients will respond before treatment. It uses large datasets of millions of cells and recognizes patterns that standard methods miss. This helps suggest which treatments or targets might work best for different patients and can even imagine effects from new drug combinations.
Open 2609.10831v1

AgentIdeaBench measures AI skill in generating new scientific ideas

AgentIdeaBench: Benchmarking Scientific Ideation in the Agent Era

Abstract: Scientific ideation is the capacity to formulate novel and testable hypotheses from scientific evidence, and autonomous AI scientists depend on it. Existing evaluations largely assess it by asking models to generate ideas from a static, curated set of reference papers. That passive setup departs from the retrieval-and-reasoning workflow of modern AI scientists, and it becomes less discriminative as models improve. We introduce AgentIdeaBench, a multidisciplinary benchmark that evaluates scientific ideation under two matched settings, static observation and active exploration. We report matched Static-Active evaluations for 33 LLMs across 40 densely scored subfields spanning five disciplines, using a multidimensional, literature-verified scoring framework whose critics assess originality against retrieved prior art. Active exploration reveals considerably more capability headroom, and that headroom is unevenly distributed across models. Performance scales about twice as fast as under static observation, and the exploration gain is capability-gated, favoring the strongest models over the weakest. The gain reflects better grounding, improving feasibility, clarity, and specificity while leaving measured originality unchanged under our critics. We further explore Scientific World Modeling, a generation-time loop that refines a draft hypothesis through structured thought experiments. It benefits mid-capability models, and its impact diminishes among frontier models that appear to have internalized such reasoning patterns already. AgentIdeaBench gives future work on scientific ideation a measurement basis suited to the agent era.

Mon 7 SeptArtificial IntelligenceComputation and Language
The gist
Creating new scientific ideas that are both original and can be tested is important for AI systems that work like scientists. The authors created AgentIdeaBench, a test that checks how well AI models can come up with new ideas by either just looking at papers or by actively exploring information. Their tests showed that letting AI explore actively reveals more about which models are better at this creative task. They also tried a method that helps AI improve its ideas step-by-step, which helped some models but not the very best ones. This benchmark helps make measuring AI creativity in science more realistic and fair.
Open 2609.07611v1