BiomedSQL: Text-to-SQL for Scientific Reasoning on Biomedical Knowledge Bases

Abstract

Biomedical researchers increasingly rely on large-scale structured databases for complex analytical tasks. However, current text-to-SQL systems often struggle to map qualitative scientific questions into executable SQL, particularly when implicit domain reasoning is required. We introduce BiomedSQL, the first benchmark explicitly designed to evaluate scientific reasoning in text-to-SQL generation over a real-world biomedical knowledge base. BiomedSQL comprises 68,000 question/SQL query/answer triples generated from templates and grounded in a harmonized BigQuery database that integrates gene-disease associations, causal inference from omics data, and drug approval records. Each question requires models to infer domain-specific criteria, such as genome-wide significance thresholds, effect directionality, or trial phase filtering, rather than rely on syntactic translation alone. We evaluate a range of open- and closed-source LLMs across prompting strategies and interaction paradigms. Our results reveal a substantial performance gap: Gemini-3-Pro achieves 58.1% execution accuracy under baseline prompting, while our custom multi-step agent, BMSQL, reaches 62.6%, both well below the expert baseline of 90.0%. BiomedSQL provides a new foundation for advancing text-to-SQL systems that support scientific discovery through robust reasoning over structured biomedical knowledge bases. The BiomedSQL benchmark and codebase are publicly available at https://datatecnica.github.io/biomedbench-suite/biomedsql.