Premortem Labs: An AI Protocol Validator for Safeguarding Biomedical Research with Local LLMs

The Premortem Labs project aims to help biomedical labs in Nigeria and West Africa identify protocol flaws before experiments using locally deployed large language models (LLMs), avoiding resource waste. This system combines the Ollama local inference framework with Google's lightweight Gemma model, addressing the scarcity of traditional manual expert review resources and providing affordable AI-assisted tools for resource-constrained regions.

In biomedical research, protocol flaws can lead to experiment failure, animal sacrifice, time and funding waste. For labs in resource-limited West Africa, this risk is even more severe: traditional manual expert review resources are scarce and costly, making it hard to meet the growing demand for reviews.

Ollama: Edge-side Model Runtime Environment

Ollama allows deploying open-source models on ordinary hardware, processing data locally to ensure privacy and reduce network dependency.

Gemma: Efficient Lightweight Inference Model

Google's Gemma model can run on consumer-grade hardware, balancing efficiency and inference capability, making it suitable for resource-limited scenarios.

Protocol Validation Knowledge Engineering

The system encodes biomedical best practices and rules, including experimental design integrity checks, ethical compliance reviews, operational feasibility assessments, and risk warnings.

• Pre-review of research protocols: Helps researchers self-check and improve the approval rate by ethics committees;
• Education and training assistance: Serves as a teaching tool to help students understand key elements of experimental design;
• Standardization for cross-institutional collaboration: Unifies protocol quality standards and supports collaboration among multiple labs.

1. Data sovereignty: Sensitive protocol data does not leave the local environment;
2. Offline availability: Not affected by network quality;
3. Controllable cost: No ongoing API fees after one-time hardware investment;
4. Low latency: Instant response;
5. Customizable: Adapts to specific research field needs.

The development faces three major challenges: medical professionalism requirements, multilingual support, and false positive/negative balance. Response strategies include: well-designed prompt engineering, domain-specific fine-tuning, and human-machine collaborative review process (the system is an auxiliary tool, and final decisions are made by human experts).

Premortem Labs adopts an open-source model to lower the barrier to use and encourage contributions from global developers. Special needs in West Africa (such as specific disease research, local ethical norms) can be integrated into the system through the community, accelerating the tool's maturity and popularization.

With the improvement of open-source model capabilities and the development of edge hardware, localized AI applications will become more common, promoting AI democratization and allowing resource-constrained regions to enjoy technological dividends. This will bring more equitable participation opportunities and consistent quality standards to global scientific research collaboration.