BioRender launches AI agent for building scientific research images

BioRender launched Leo, an AI agent that guides researchers through planning, sketching, and building scientific figures, on Tuesday. BioRender co-founder and CEO Shiz Aoki said Leo "doesn't jump from prompt to picture" but instead asks questions and offers sketches that researchers can refine by hand, targeting the erosion of trust in science caused by AI-generated images. BioRender's technology serves more than four million scientists and 15 Nobel Prize-winning labs, and Anthropic struck a deal last October to integrate BioRender's library into its Claude for Life Sciences model.

BioRender https://www.biorender.com has unveiled an AI agent purpose-built for generating scientific figures. The news: The Toronto software startup announced the launch of Leo on Tuesday. Rather than require repeated prompting, BioRender says that Leo guides researchers as they plan, sketch, and build scientific images in the same fashion as “a trained medical illustrator.” The company claims Leo can help clients generate accurate, clear, and editable figures with greater fidelity than general-purpose AI. This is important for a company that has set its sights on addressing a growing issue: “ the erosion of trust https://www.biorender.com/case-study/trust-in-ai-report-2026 in science caused by a proliferation of AI-generated images.” From the source: “Nearly every week, a new AI image-generation tool is released,” BioRender co-founder and CEO Shiz Aoki said in a statement. “But scientists can’t rely on them because they treat scientific figures the way they would any other type of illustration. Leo is designed differently. It doesn’t jump from prompt to picture. Instead, it provides scientists with actual figure-making expertise, asking questions, offering sketches, and building images that a researcher can continue to refine by hand.” The context: Aoki previously worked as lead science illustrator at National Geographic . She teamed up with repeat tech entrepreneur Ryan Marien and software engineer Katya Shteyn the company’s CTO to found BioRender in 2017. Since then, the company has been working to standardize the visual language of biology through tech by helping researchers produce scientific graphics in minutes rather than hours or days. Aoki noted that the deterministic nature of science, which leaves “no room for randomness or chance,” makes it particularly difficult to visualize. While general-purpose text-to-image generative AI tools such as ChatGPT, DALL-E, Gemini, and Midjourney can produce scientific research images, they often fail to meet academic and publication standards because they were not trained on specialized domain knowledge. Given this, they can be more prone to hallucination and require significant re-prompting and high token spending to produce useful illustrations. Final thought: BioRender has built a so-called AI-powered “ Canva for Science https://www.inc.com/talib-visram/how-a-medical-illustrator-built-canva-for-science/91276581 ” that helps more than four million scientists and 15 Nobel Prize-winning labs draw biological diagrams more easily and communicate their research more efficiently. The startup’s tech has even caught the attention of American AI giant Anthropic, which struck a deal last October to integrate BioRender’s library into its Claude for Life Sciences model. Feature image courtesy Pexels https://www.pexels.com/photo/woman-in-white-long-sleeved-laboratory-gown-standing-3735715/ . Photo by Polina Tankilevitch https://www.pexels.com/@polina-tankilevitch/ .