A Precedent-Guided Co-Scientist for Side-Effect-Aware Drug Redesign

Abstract: We propose PRECEDE, a precedent-guided co-scientist for side-effect-aware drug redesign that revises a parent compound to mitigate a specified side effect while preserving therapeutic function. Rather than isolated molecular generation, PRECEDE frames redesign as evidence-grounded reasoning over drug--side-effect associations, biomedical knowledge graphs, and precedents of safety-driven optimization, coordinated by an LLM orchestrator with explicit policies and human-review checkpoints. We position PRECEDE as a human-supervised AI-for-science workflow in which hypotheses remain auditable, falsifiable, and bounded by prior pharmacology.