Evidence-Grounded Frontier Mapping and Agentic Hypothesis Generation in Nanomedicine

Abstract

Nanomedicine research spans delivery chemistry, immunology, imaging, biomaterials, and disease-specific translational science, yet its conceptual design space remains fragmented across a large and heterogeneous literature. To date, artificial intelligence in nanomedicine has focused primarily on property prediction and formulation optimization, with much less attention to evidence-grounded discovery support at the level of research direction selection. We introduce pArticleMap, a literature-mapping and research-hypothesis-generation system that combines article embeddings, similarity-graph analysis, sparse frontier extraction, structured evidence-pack retrieval, and an audited large-language-model (LLM) workflow for grounded ideation. Rather than forecasting future concept co-occurrence, pArticleMap targets low-density article-level bridge regions and cluster interfaces, then generates and scores citation-grounded hypotheses with large language models in an agentic setup. We evaluate the system with a retrospective realization benchmark (generate later literature under a historical cutoff) and a blinded human reader assessment layer across cue-conditioned nanomedicine tasks. Across 4 selected retrospective bundles, pArticleMap generated ideas and selected task-retained hypotheses (winner ideas) under the benchmark protocol. For task-level retained hypotheses, a pooled gold recovery rate of 10.8% was obtained, with a recall@10 of 15.9% and a future-neighborhood rate of 61.0%, indicating that the system often reached the correct forward-looking neighborhood (paper ideas) even without exact paper-level recovery. Human-agent agreement is modest overall, indicating that internal scoring is useful as a support signal but does not replace expert judgment. These results position pArticleMap as a conservative, evidence-grounded research assistant for nanomedicine.