Research Assistant: AstraZeneca's Agentic System for R&D
On the map: LLM agents and tool use → Medical and scientific domain agents
Abstract (arXiv)
We describe Research Assistant, an internal LLM-based system developed at AstraZeneca to help scientists and clinicians explore biomedical questions across a broad range of data sources. The system provides a chat-style interface that brings together evidence from scientific literature, knowledge graphs, chemistry, clinical trials, safety resources, expression data, and internal experimental systems. It supports both a fast mode for direct question answering and a multi-step mode for more complex research tasks. Responses are grounded in retrieved evidence and linked back to the original sources, allowing users to review and further explore the underlying data. In this technical note, we outline the system architecture, the main design choices behind the product, and lessons learned from deploying it at scale to support day-to-day R&D workflows across AstraZeneca.
Key facts. No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026). Placed in Medical and scientific domain agents, one of 16 directions in LLM agents and tool use. Builds on 8 of its 17 references that are in the map. First posted on arXiv 6 Aug 2026.
Builds on
8 of 17 references.
References · 8
- 2018BERT: Pre-training of Deep Bidirectional Transformers for Language Understandingcited by 40,399
- 2016Semi-Supervised Classification with Graph Convolutional Networkscited by 11,361
- 2017Graph Attention Networkscited by 8,923
- 2016Complex Embeddings for Simple Link Predictioncited by 902
- 2019RotatE: Knowledge Graph Embedding by Relational Rotation in Complex Spacecited by 898
- 2025Accelerating scientific discovery with Co-Scientistcited by 401
- 2018Prioritizing network communitiescited by 14
- 2022Biomedical NER for the Enterprise with Distillated BERN2 and the Kazu Frameworkcited by 3
Built on by
Not cited yet.
Similar, not cited
Close in wording, no citation either way
- 2025Agent Laboratory: Using LLM Agents as Research Assistants
- 2025DiscoVerse: Multi-Agent Pharmaceutical Co-Scientist for Traceable Drug Discovery and Reverse Translation
- 2026ClinAgent: A ReAct-Based Agent for Conversational Access to Clinical Trial Information
- 2026BioResearcher: Scenario-Guided Multi-Agent for Translational Medicine
- 2026NVAITC AI Scientist: A Governed End-to-End Research System -- A Hypertension GWAS Case Study
- 2026Knows: Agent-Native Structured Research Representations
- 2026Can LLM Agents Generate Real-World Evidence? Evaluating Observational Studies in Medical Databases
- 2025Towards Scientific Intelligence: A Survey of LLM-based Scientific Agents