AI Agents for Biological Discovery: From Spatial Omics to Therapeutics
Spatial omics experiments are generating terabyte-scale datasets faster than any team can analyze them. AI agent systems are emerging as a serious response to that bottleneck and this month, we're getting a rigorous, field-wide view of where things actually stand.
Join Bioinformatics eXchange on April 18 for a talk by Dr. Ilknur Icke, computational scientist and Head of R&D at Symbiont-AI Cognitive Labs, presenting her landscape analysis of 37 AI agent systems published between 2024 and 2026.
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Ilknur will cover:
A taxonomy for understanding the rapidly evolving agent landscape (topology × goal)
The agent performance equation: Model × Harness × Protocol — and why the harness matters as much as the model
A deep dive into spatiAlytica, a multi-agent co-scientist for spatial biology recently presented at NextGen Omics Boston, including its architecture, a case study on CAF remodeling in ovarian cancer, and validation results with real biologists
The downstream connection: how spatial analysis agents link to therapeutic reasoning (TxAgent, PandaClaw)
A reality check: current benchmark results and what they tell us about where the field actually stands
Whether you work with spatial data, are exploring AI tools for your research, or are simply curious about where AI-driven biological discovery is heading — this talk is for you.
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About Dr. Ilknur Icke
Ilknur is a computational scientist with 14+ years in life sciences and pharma R&D, working at the intersection of biology, biosensing, and computational modeling. She has held leadership roles at Novo Nordisk, Bayer, Takeda, and Merck, and co-organized the SPARTA workshop (Spatial Reasoning and Therapeutics with AI) at AAAI 2026 in Singapore. She holds a PhD in Computer Science (Visual Analytics) from CUNY and an MS in Bioimaging from Boston University.
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