CROssBARv2: A Unified Computational Framework for Heterogeneous Biomedical Data Representation and LLM-Driven Exploration

Abstract

Biomedical discovery is hindered by fragmented, modality-specific repositories and uneven metadata, limiting integrative analysis, accessibility, and reproducibility. To address these challenges, we present CROssBARv2, a provenance-rich biomedical data-and-knowledge integration platform that unifies heterogeneous sources into a maintainable, scalable system. By consolidating diverse data types into an extensive knowledge graph enriched with standardised ontologies, rich metadata, and deep learning-based vector embeddings, CROssBARv2 alleviates the need for researchers to navigate multiple siloed databases and can facilitate downstream tasks, including predictive modelling and mechanistic reasoning, enabling applications such as drug repurposing and protein function prediction. The platform offers interactive graph exploration and embedding-based semantic search with CROssBAR-LLM, an intuitive natural language question-answering system that grounds large language model (LLM) outputs in the underlying knowledge graph to mitigate hallucinations. We assess CROssBARv2 through (i) multiple use-case analyses to test biological coherence and relational validity; (ii) knowledge-augmented biomedical question-answering benchmarks comparing CROssBAR-LLM against generalist LLMs; and (iii) a deep learning-based predictive modelling experiment for protein function prediction leveraging the heterogeneous structure of CROssBARv2. Collectively, CROssBARv2 provides a scalable, AI-ready, and user-friendly foundation that facilitates hypothesis generation, knowledge discovery, and translational research.