An interoperable research agent network for scientific discovery

Abstract

Recent advances in agentic systems have enabled the autonomous execution of research tasks across scientific domains. However, the rapid emergence of specialized scientific agents for areas such as computational pathology, microbiome research, gene editing, materials science, organic chemistry, and drug discovery has created a fragmented ecosystem of scientific capabilities. While these agents often demonstrate strong performance within their respective domains, limited interoperability makes it difficult to combine expertise across platforms and coordinate complex interdisciplinary workflows. Here we introduce GUIA (Guided-research Utilizing Intelligent Agents), an interoperable research-agent network built upon a flexible Agent-to-Agent (A2A) communication architecture. GUIA enables both in-house and third-party agents to collaborate within shared workflows, allowing scientific capabilities to accumulate through the integration of complementary expertise. We evaluated GUIA through four assessments spanning baseline benchmarking, third-party single-agent integration, third-party multi-agent integration, and cross-server agent collaboration. Furthermore, we demonstrate its practical utility through real-world applications involving therapeutic target discovery, drug discovery, and spatial proteomics analysis. Together, our results show that interoperable research-agent networks can coordinate specialized expertise across independently developed systems, providing a scalable framework for expanding scientific capabilities through collaboration.