Grounding AI agents in biological reality: Building blocks for autonomous wet labs
research.google uses cookies from Google to deliver and enhance the quality of its services and to analyze traffic. Learn more October 16, 2026 Pooja Rao, Research Scientist, Petar Sirkovic, Software Engineer, and Annalisa Pawlosky, Research Scientist, Google We are bringing AI agents to the wet-lab bench at Google Research to navigate complex biological landscapes. By grounding agents in physical lab robotics, we can run fast closed-loop molecular design cycles where agents learn how to learn, ultimately discovering single-digit nanomolar protein binders for cancer targets. Frontier AI systems have the potential to transform biology research and drug discovery by intelligently navigating vast combinatorial search spaces (e.g., a single 100-amino-acid protein spans at least 20100 possible sequences) calling for dynamic multi-candidate exploration. Our long-term research vision is that AI agents will not only ideate and analyze, but also run lab experiments to test their hypotheses, lea