Anthropic develops drugs

Anthropic made two announcements in the last week about its plans in AI for science. First was the launch of Claude Science, a platform that integrates dozens of scientific databases and bioinformatics models and currently runs on Opus 4.81. Second, that it plans to develop drugs of its own.

I found it interesting for multiple reasons: Anthropic committed to working on pre-clinical research – drug development in the lab and potentially in animals – but didn’t rule out taking its drugs through clinical trials as well. It also plans to focus on “neglected diseases” with weak commercial incentives, which it describes as potentially including both rare genetic disorders and tropical diseases, although it hasn’t disclosed any examples of diseases or drug modalities that it might work on.

This follows Anthropic’s acquisition of Coefficient Bio,2 a stealth startup, earlier this year, with roughly ten people who came mostly from Genentech’s computational drug discovery unit; and Anthropic is also building its own wet lab.

But why work on drug development at all? According to Anthropic, it’s to get hands-on experience in the field it works with companies on and to build a feedback loop to learn how to make better tools and models. As their head of life sciences Eric Kauderer-Abrams described it, there’s no substitute for being “in the trenches trying to develop drugs.”

I’d be more optimistic about Anthropic’s chances for developing successful drugs for rare genetic diseases, which tend to be ‘simpler’ in biological terms – as they’re often caused by a single gene or mutation that can be targeted with drugs and gene therapies – than neglected tropical diseases, for which the biological data to understand them, and how to target them with drugs, is often lacking in the first place. And since the best validation of drugs is testing them in human clinical trials, rather than in the lab or animals, I’m left wondering if they’ve deliberately kept that possibility open. Even aside from that, it seems to me that clinical testing and manufacturing, rather than preclinical drug discovery, are more important bottlenecks to progress on both fronts, although most AI tools so far have been built for preclinical work.

News reporting also suggests that their stated focus, on neglected diseases, helps them avoid stepping on pharma companies’ toes. In a sense, thanks to the Orphan Drug Act, faster approval processes, and rare disease priority vouchers, rare diseases aren’t as neglected as they used to be and pharma companies do have some incentives to develop drugs for them (and they now make up roughly half of annual new drug approvals) – but there are so many different rare diseases that the rationale probably still works.

But building labs and hiring top wet lab biologists seems like a first step rather than an end goal in itself; and since clinical trials and manufacturing are the bigger bottlenecks, delivering on Anthropic’s public mission would probably mean going much farther than what they’ve announced so far.