An AI agent for treatment reasoning over a biomedical tool universe

Treatment reasoning underpins every therapeutic decision, integrating disease context, comorbidities, medications, contraindications, and evolving biomedical knowledge to select an appropriate therapy.

It is inherently iterative: candidates are weighed against many constraints, revised as evidence emerges, and grounded in verifiable sources.

Here we introduce ATHENA-R1, an AI agent for treatment reasoning across all FDA approved drugs since 1939, trained by reinforcement learning over a universe of 212 biomedical tools.

At each step it identifies missing information, selects and runs relevant tools, and incorporates the evidence.

To train it without human-annotated traces, we build a two-level self-learning framework: multi-agent systems construct the tools, tasks, and reasoning trajectories for supervised fine-tuning, then reinforcement learning with scientific feedback rewards reasoning quality (evidence gathering, grounded tool use, logical non-redundancy).

Across five benchmarks of 3,168 drug reasoning tasks and 456 patient treatment cases, ATHENA-R1 outperforms language models and tool-use systems, reaching 94.7% accuracy on open-ended drug reasoning and 82.9% on treatment reasoning, 17.8 and 10.7 points above GPT-5.

In blinded evaluations by experts from 28 rare disease organizations, it is preferred over reference models on all criteria, and physicians rated it favorably on complex hospitalized cardiovascular and infectious-disease cases.

Adverse-event hypotheses it generated, tested in electronic health records from 5.4 million patients, reached adjusted odds ratios of 1.48-1.84, with no elevation among negative controls.

Because it requires knowing what evidence to seek before concluding, treatment reasoning has long been hard for AI; we show it can be reframed as a learnable process of iterative evidence gathering that reinforcement learning can train AI to perform.