bioRxiv

ContinuumCellAgent: A Framework-Guided Agent for Long-Horizon Scientific Research

Preprint: computational studyAI & data
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Abstract

Abstract AI-scientist systems are beginning to automate parts of scientific research. We present C ontinuum C ell A gent , an autonomous agent that executes literature review, hypothesis formation, computational experimentation, manuscript drafting, and adversarial peer review as a single unattended run. Existing AI scientist systems remain difficult to diagnose because they lack modularity, systematic prompt grounding, and observability into long-running behavior. C ontinuum C ell A gent addresses these gaps with a modular supernode architecture for stage-wise backend swapping, protocols grounded in curated research-method checklists that also define reviewer rubrics, and a diagnostics layer that records file-based artifacts, message traces, and state transitions. We evaluate the system on open-domain QA benchmarks and biomedical/longevity case studies, showing that it can produce checkable research artifacts while exposing pipeline dynamics for rigorous AI co-scientist research.

The paper

Washington University in St. Louis

bioRxiv, 19 Jun 2026, Open access, CC BY-NC-ND, Preprint, not peer-reviewed

doi.org/10.64898/2026.06.15.732409