Anthropic shares early results from using Claude in drug development

Anthropic published an update on partnerships its life sciences team has run over the past several months with six organizations, BigHat Biosciences, Bristol Myers Squibb, Divergence Labs, Enveda, Generate Biomedicines, and The Column Group, plus its own in-house drug discovery efforts, including a program for rare childhood forms of muscular dystrophy.

Among the case studies: Generate Biomedicines used Claude Code to redesign part of a CAR T-cell cancer therapy, producing a version about 70% shorter that let immune cells make roughly 10 times as many cancer-spotting receptors in lab tests. Divergence Labs had Claude generate roughly 35,000 antibody designs in about a month for a food-allergy treatment, yielding early hits: three designs that bind IgE and 20 that can dislodge it from immune cells. BigHat Biosciences used Claude alongside its automated lab to test about 1,010 molecule variants over 10 weeks, improving binding tightness more than 10-fold on one lead. At Enveda, Claude reviewed 1,061 pages of manufacturing documentation, catching all 11 issues human reviewers found plus seven they missed, cutting review time by 89%.

Anthropic also described acquiring Mithril Medicine, a one-person company whose founder used Claude to manage contracts, logistics, and experiments across 11 external labs, taking a muscular dystrophy treatment candidate from idea to promising mouse results in under 18 months; Anthropic expects a possible human clinical trial as soon as late 2028. Anthropic says this work is still mostly preclinical and plans to scale it up substantially.

Why it matters

These are some of the most concrete, named case studies yet of AI models doing substantive scientific and operational work inside real drug development programs, not just answering questions about biology.

Source: Anthropic