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arXiv · 2609.19099

Evidence-Grounded Agentic Formulation Development in an Autonomous Laboratory

Michael M. Craig·Riley J. Hickman·Yingshan Ma·Rémi Piché-Taillefer·Christine Allen·Pauric Bannigan
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Abstract

Self-emulsifying drug delivery systems (SEDDS) can improve the oral bioavailability of poorly soluble drugs, but identifying high-performing formulations remains experimentally intensive. We present Andromeda 2, an agentic system that reasons over structured in-house experimental evidence and invokes computational and experimental tools to design and execute successive formulation batches. Using a miniaturized automated laboratory at a matched budget, we benchmark it against Andromeda 1, a probabilistic optimization model deployed across dozens of live development projects, and a wet-lab design-of-experiments (DoE) campaign. For paclitaxel, Andromeda 2 achieved a 50% high-performance hit rate versus 17% for Andromeda 1 and 2% for DoE, and identified 12 formulations meeting all four target product profile (TPP) objectives versus 6 and 0, respectively. Median $AUC_{10-240}$ was 70.1, 12.0, and 3.5 mg$\cdot$min/mL, while maximum AUC was comparable between Andromeda 2 and Andromeda 1. A selected full-TPP formulation achieved an apparent effective paclitaxel loading of $19 \pm 5\%$ w/w at the first FaSSIF measurement, approximately 3.3-fold higher than the 5.7% w/w loading reported for a published paclitaxel S-SEDDS. A controlled ablation showed that access to structured in-house experimental evidence increased mean AUC by 34%.

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Michael M. Craig, Riley J. Hickman, Yingshan Ma, Rémi Piché-Taillefer, Christine Allen, Pauric Bannigan. 2026-09-16. Evidence-Grounded Agentic Formulation Development in an Autonomous Laboratory. https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.19099

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