DiscoBAX: Discovery of Optimal Intervention Sets in Genomic Experiment Design
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Abstract (arXiv)
The discovery of therapeutics to treat genetically-driven pathologies relies on identifying genes involved in the underlying disease mechanisms. Existing approaches search over the billions of potential interventions to maximize the expected influence on the target phenotype. However, to reduce the risk of failure in future stages of trials, practical experiment design aims to find a set of interventions that maximally change a target phenotype via diverse mechanisms. We propose DiscoBAX, a sample-efficient method for maximizing the rate of significant discoveries per experiment while simultaneously probing for a wide range of diverse mechanisms during a genomic experiment campaign. We provide theoretical guarantees of approximate optimality under standard assumptions, and conduct a comprehensive experimental evaluation covering both synthetic as well as real-world experimental design tasks. DiscoBAX outperforms existing state-of-the-art methods for experimental design, selecting effective and diverse perturbations in biological systems.
Key facts. Cited by 12 papers in the map (data through 7 Oct 2026). Builds on 17 of its 54 references that are in the map. First posted on arXiv 7 Dec 2023.
Builds on
17 of 54 references.
References · 17
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5 more
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Citing papers per year: 2024: 4; 2025: 6; 2026: 2.
12 papers.
- 2024BioDiscoveryAgent: An AI Agent for Designing Genetic Perturbation Experimentscited by 49
- 2025LLMs for Bayesian Optimization in Scientific Domains: Are We There Yet?cited by 10
- 2024Automated Discovery of Pairwise Interactions from Unstructured Datacited by 8
- 2024Challenges and Considerations in the Evaluation of Bayesian Causal Discoverycited by 5
- 2025In-silico biological discovery with large perturbation modelscited by 4
- 2024Practical Bayesian Algorithm Execution via Posterior Samplingcited by 2
- 2025BioBO: Biology-informed Bayesian Optimization for Perturbation Designcited by 2
- 2026Unveiling the Structure of Do-Calculus Reasoning via Derivation Graphscited by 1
- 2025Deep Active Learning based Experimental Design to Uncover Synergistic Genetic Interactions for Host Targeted Therapeuticscited by 0
- 2025Efficient Data Selection for Training Genomic Perturbation Modelscited by 0
- 2025g-DPO: Scalable Preference Optimization for Protein Language Modelscited by 0
- 2026Many Needles in a Haystack: Active Hit Discovery for Perturbation Experimentscited by 0
- 2026Unveiling the Structure of Do-Calculus Reasoning via Derivation Graphs2 Jun 2026
- 2026Many Needles in a Haystack: Active Hit Discovery for Perturbation Experiments11 May 2026
- 2025g-DPO: Scalable Preference Optimization for Protein Language Models22 Oct 2025
- 2025LLMs for Bayesian Optimization in Scientific Domains: Are We There Yet?24 Sep 2025
- 2025BioBO: Biology-informed Bayesian Optimization for Perturbation Design24 Sep 2025
- 2025In-silico biological discovery with large perturbation models30 Mar 2025
- 2025Efficient Data Selection for Training Genomic Perturbation Models18 Mar 2025
- 2025Deep Active Learning based Experimental Design to Uncover Synergistic Genetic Interactions for Host Targeted Therapeutics3 Feb 2025
- 2024Practical Bayesian Algorithm Execution via Posterior Sampling27 Oct 2024
- 2024Automated Discovery of Pairwise Interactions from Unstructured Data11 Sep 2024
- 2024Challenges and Considerations in the Evaluation of Bayesian Causal Discovery5 Jun 2024
- 2024BioDiscoveryAgent: An AI Agent for Designing Genetic Perturbation Experiments27 May 2024