Hunt Globally: Wide Search AI Agents for Drug Asset Scouting in Investing, Business Development, and Competitive Intelligence

Abstract

Bio-pharmaceutical innovation has shifted: many new drug assets now originate outside the United States and are disclosed primarily via regional, non-English channels. Recent data suggests that over 85% of patent filings originate outside the U.S., with China accounting for nearly half of the global total. A growing share of scholarly output is also non-U.S. Industry estimates put China at 30% of global drug development, spanning 1,200+ novel candidates. In this high-stakes environment, failing to surface "under-the-radar" assets creates multi-billion-dollar risk for investors and business development teams, making asset scouting a coverage-critical competition where speed and completeness drive value. Yet today's Deep Research AI agents still lag human experts in achieving high recall discovery across heterogeneous, multilingual sources without hallucination. We propose a benchmarking methodology for drug asset scouting and a tuned, tree-based self-learning Bioptic Agent aimed at complete, non-hallucinated scouting. We construct a challenging completeness benchmark using a multilingual multi-agent pipeline: complex user queries paired with ground-truth assets that are largely outside U.S.-centric radar. To reflect real-deal complexity, we collected screening queries from expert investors, BD, and VC professionals and used them as priors to conditionally generate benchmark queries. For grading, we use LLM-as-judge evaluation calibrated to expert opinions. On this benchmark, our Bioptic Agent achieves 79.7% F1 score, outperforming Claude Opus 4.6 (56.2%), Gemini 3 Pro + Deep Research (50.6%), OpenAI GPT-5.2 Pro (46.6%), Perplexity Deep Research (44.2%), and Exa Websets (26.9%). Performance improves steeply with additional compute, supporting the view that more compute yields better results.