Anthropic published an update on its drug-development work, saying its life sciences team is "working to accelerate curing disease." Over the past several months its scientists have run deep research partnerships with six organizations developing new medicines: BigHat Biosciences, Bristol Myers Squibb, Divergence Labs, Enveda, Generate Biomedicines and The Column Group. Anthropic has also begun drug discovery efforts of its own, including programs for rare childhood forms of muscular dystrophy where Claude handles much of the scientific and operational work. It plans to scale this up substantially. Anthropic's announcement came with technical reports and preprints for each case.
The strategy
Drug development spans target identification, molecule design, manufacturing optimization, regulatory filings and trial design and administration, so Anthropic argues the bottlenecks are distributed throughout the process, beyond the commonly discussed task of proposing new molecules. Its approach is to get deeply involved in real programs across disease areas and stages, to learn where Claude is strong and weak (it has already prioritized model improvements), to produce case studies for the wider life sciences community, and, if the trajectories continue, to have direct impact on diseases including food allergies, rare childhood diseases and several cancers.
Case studies
- Generate Biomedicines (modality engineering): Generate wants to reengineer CAR T-cell therapy, which has helped treat blood cancers, so it can treat solid tumors, by shortening one part of the therapy's genetic instructions to make room for more. Six Generate scientists used Claude Code to propose new designs. One was about 70% shorter than the standard version and in lab tests let immune cells make roughly 10 times as many receptors, kill tumor cells more efficiently and stay active longer.
- Divergence Labs (hit generation): the company is developing food-allergy drugs that detach IgE from immune cells, not only neutralize circulating IgE, which needs a two-armed molecule. Claude turned the goals into a design plan and, largely autonomously, generated roughly 35,000 antibody designs in about a month. Early tests found three designs that bind IgE and 20 that dislodge it, three of which appeared to dislodge IgE more than the standard medication. The next step is a drug combining both arms.
- BigHat Biosciences (lead optimization): Claude, connected to BigHat's lab data system, proposed changes to two antibody-fragment leads, and the lab made and tested about 1,010 variants in about 10 weeks. Partway through, the team suspected the standard heat-stability and clumping metrics were misleading, and Claude and an Anthropic researcher reanalyzed the raw data and proposed new metrics and a protocol change that held up. The best versions bound more than 10x more tightly, the cancer-targeting lead stayed in solution 18°C higher, and the lead for longer-lasting drugs clumped more than 100x more slowly.
- Enveda (manufacturing and filings): manufacturing chemists spent up to 75% of their time on paperwork. Enveda connected its manufacturing documents to Claude to flag issues. Across 1,061 pages, Claude caught all 11 issues human reviewers had spotted and flagged seven they missed, cutting review time by 89%, from over 25 hours to under three. Claude also wrote first drafts of two regulatory documents, one in four hours against about three months by hand, and for the other human review found one minor error.
- The Column Group (company creation): TCG is establishing Pleiades, a new company that will use Claude to run many more, and more complex, drug programs than a small team usually can. Its first Claude skill, for judging whether drug targets are worth pursuing, has been evaluated on 45 target-disease pairs.
- Bristol Myers Squibb (clinical trial planning): a more recent partnership, in which BMS uses Claude to assess plans for an early-stage drug's trials and estimate their likelihood of success, to be expanded in 2027. BMS's Michael Pourdehnad says a single prompt produced a robust initial analysis that "would otherwise take days to complete," while keeping sensitive data secure.
Anthropic's own program
Anthropic acquired Mithril Medicine, a one-person company developing treatments for two rare forms of muscular dystrophy. Its founder, Cody Tranbarger, used Claude to organize contracts, logistics and experiments with 11 external labs, and Mithril took a possible treatment from an idea to promising results in mice in under 18 months. Tranbarger is now at Anthropic and plans several new programs, and if the candidates hold up, Anthropic expects a drug could be ready for human trials as soon as late 2028.
What comes next
Anthropic stresses the work is mostly preclinical so far, and plans to extend Claude into clinical trials as programs advance and as it partners with clinical-stage organizations. It points to Claude Science, Claude credits for life scientists, the Life Sciences Verification Program that gives trusted organizations a more permissive version of its safeguards, and an open call for guest investigators. It follows Anthropic's life sciences lab and the scorpion antivenom binder design.