Anthropic says Claude is already speeding up parts of drug development

Anthropic says its life sciences team has spent several months running deep research partnerships with six organizations that develop new medicines, using its Claude AI model on drug development tasks that go beyond designing new molecules. The company has also started its own drug discovery programs, including one for rare childhood forms of muscular dystrophy, a disease that weakens muscles over time. The six partners are BigHat Biosciences, Bristol Myers Squibb, Divergence Labs, Enveda, Generate Biomedicines, and The Column Group. Anthropic says drug development has many separate slowdowns rather than one single problem, spanning early target research, molecule design, manufacturing, regulatory filings, and clinical trial planning.

At Generate Biomedicines, scientists used Claude Code to redesign part of the genetic instructions behind CAR T-cell therapy, a cancer treatment that reprograms immune cells to attack tumors. One new design was about 70% shorter than the standard version and, in lab tests, let immune cells produce roughly ten times as many receptors, the proteins cells use to spot cancer. Generate says the therapy also killed tumor cells more efficiently and the immune cells stayed active longer.

At Divergence Labs, Claude turned the company’s goals for a food-allergy treatment into a design plan, then generated about 35,000 antibody designs over roughly a month, largely on its own. Early lab tests found three designs that bind to IgE, an immune molecule that triggers allergic reactions, and 20 that can detach IgE from immune cells; three of those 20 appeared to outperform standard allergy medication at dislodging it. Divergence’s next step is combining both functions into a single drug.

BigHat Biosciences paired Claude with its automated lab system, Reccy, to improve two antibody fragments over about ten weeks of testing on roughly 1,010 variants. According to BigHat, the best versions bound their targets more than ten times as tightly, one stayed stable at a temperature 18 degrees Celsius higher than before, and the other clumped together more than 100 times more slowly. At Enveda, Claude reviewed manufacturing paperwork and caught all 11 issues human reviewers had found across 1,061 pages, plus seven they had missed, cutting review time by 89%, the company says.

Bristol Myers Squibb is using Claude to assess an early-stage drug’s clinical trial plans and estimate its odds of success. Michael Pourdehnad, the company’s senior vice president for early clinical development in hematology, oncology and cell therapy, said a single prompt produced an initial analysis that would otherwise take days to complete. Separately, Anthropic acquired Mithril Medicine, a one-person company whose founder, Cody Tranbarger, used Claude to manage contracts and experiments across 11 external labs, taking a potential muscular dystrophy treatment from an idea to promising results in mice in under 18 months.

Anthropic says all of this work remains mostly preclinical, meaning the drugs have not yet been tested in humans. The company says it plans to extend Claude’s role into clinical trials as these programs advance, and is offering a research workbench called Claude Science along with free credits to outside life scientists. What to watch next is whether any of the six partnered programs, or Anthropic’s own muscular dystrophy work, reach testing in actual patients.