Accelerating Health and Life Sciences Research with AI Agents
Scigent is an open-source agentic platform that integrates validated scientific tools, published literature, and researcher oversight, turning general-purpose AI models into trustworthy scientific collaborators.
The Rate-Limiting Step in Modern Science
Even expert researchers can engage with only a fraction of the data, literature, and tools relevant to their work. General-purpose AI coding assistants generate scripts but lack the scientific grounding to meaningfully accelerate discovery.
- Vast volumes of scattered data, tools, and literature slow discovery from depression’s neural signatures to genomic variant interpretation.
- AI agents without grounding hallucinate parameters and duplicate effort.
- The result: months-to-years timelines from raw data to advanced analysis.
How Scigent Works
Scigent combines agentic AI with a validated research ecosystem. Researchers and agents collaborate to plan and execute end-to-end scientific analyses, with the researcher in control at every step. From neuroscience biomarkers to rare-variant interpretation to tissue-level disease mechanisms, full pipelines come together in days instead of weeks.
- Skill files encode domain knowledge and parameter constraints to steer agents toward valid workflows.
- Validated tool registry built on 200+ containerised scientific tools.
- Literature grounding via published evidence and DOIs.
- Full provenance and reproducibility built in by default.
- Model-agnostic — wraps commercial and open-source LLMs as they evolve.
- Runs anywhere — laptop, hosted research, or partner infrastructure.
Built on Neurodesk
Scigent extends Neurodesk, our open-source platform for biomedical imaging analysis, published in Nature Methods. Neurodesk provides the validated tool foundation Scigent builds on.
- 200+ containerised, version-pinned scientific tools.
- 3,800 monthly users across 100+ countries, with several institutional deployments underway in 2026.
- Australian iAwards 2025 winner — Best Technology Platform.
- Backed by $2.5M+ AUD from ARDC, CZI, Wellcome Trust, and NIF.
planning pipeline... 3 tools, 7 steps
executing with claude-sonnet-4 in fmriprep container
✓ pipeline complete tokens -50% compute -20%
Measuring What Matters
We co-develop Terminal Bench Science with Stanford and the Laude Institute as the primary benchmark for scientific AI agents. Early results across 20 neuroimaging workflows show meaningful efficiency gains.
- 20% reduction in compute across benchmarked workflows.
- 50% reduction in token usage.
- Systematic evaluation across commercial and open-source models.
- Openly released benchmark suite as a community reference.
Open source. Open science.
Scigent is open source and built openly with the research community. Contribute skill files, benchmark tasks, or pilot the platform in your domain.