Anthropic shared an update on October 27, 2026, about how its AI model Claude is being used to develop new medicines. The company said it has worked with six organizations over the past several months.
The partners are BigHat Biosciences, Bristol Myers Squibb, Divergence Labs, Enveda, Generate Biomedicines, and The Column Group. Anthropic has also started its own drug discovery programs.
The company said most of the work is still preclinical. That means the drugs have mostly not been tested in humans yet.
Lab Results From Partner Companies
Generate Biomedicines is working to make CAR T-cell therapy, a cancer treatment, work against solid tumors. Six of its scientists used Claude Code to design a shorter piece of the therapy’s genetic instructions.
One design was about 70% shorter than the standard version. In lab tests, it helped immune cells make roughly 10 times as many receptors and kill tumor cells more efficiently.
Divergence Labs is developing a food allergy treatment that would remove a molecule called IgE from immune cells. Claude generated roughly 35,000 antibody designs in about a month, largely on its own.
Early tests found three designs that bound to IgE and 20 that could dislodge it. Three of those 20 appeared to work better than the standard medication.
BigHat Biosciences used Claude to improve two antibody fragments. Its lab made and tested about 1,010 variants in about 10 weeks.
The best versions bound more than 10 times more tightly than the originals. One stayed stable at temperatures 18°C higher, and the other clumped more than 100 times more slowly.
Paperwork, Trials, and New Programs
At Enveda, manufacturing chemists spent up to 75% of their time on paperwork. In tests on 1,061 pages, Claude caught all 11 issues human reviewers found and flagged seven they missed.
Human review time fell by 89%, from over 25 hours to under three. Claude also drafted one regulatory document in four hours, a task that takes about three months by hand.
The Column Group is launching a new company called Pleiades. It plans to use Claude to run more drug programs than a small team usually could.
Bristol Myers Squibb is using Claude to assess an early-stage drug in clinical trials and estimate its chance of success. The two companies plan to expand this work in 2027.
“From a single prompt, Claude generated a robust initial analysis that helped inform our assessment of different development options, which would otherwise take days to complete,” said Michael Pourdehnad, a senior vice president at Bristol Myers Squibb.
Anthropic also acquired Mithril Medicine, a one-person company developing treatments for two rare forms of muscular dystrophy. Founder Cody Tranbarger used Claude to manage work with 11 outside labs.
Mithril took one possible treatment from an idea to promising results in mice in less than 18 months. Tranbarger now works at Anthropic and plans to start several new programs.
Anthropic also offers Claude Science, a workbench for researchers, along with Claude credits for life scientists. It has opened a call for guest investigators in the life sciences.
If Mithril’s drug candidates continue to hold up, Anthropic expects a drug could be ready for human clinical trials as soon as late 2028.
