Anthropic is running its own drug programs after acquiring a one-person biotech

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Anthropic released early results from drug development work with six partners, including Bristol Myers Squibb

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Anthropic has acquired Mithril Medicine, a solo-run startup working on therapies for two rare types of muscular dystrophy, and has begun pursuing in-house drug discovery programs, Anthropic said.

In the same blog post, published Tuesday according to The Next Web, Anthropic shared preliminary findings from collaborations with six organizations: BigHat Biosciences, Bristol Myers Squibb $BMY, Divergence Labs, Enveda, Generate Biomedicines and The Column Group. Anthropic said the work is mostly preclinical, meaning most of the drug candidates have yet to be tested in people.

Mithril founder Cody Tranbarger relied on Claude to coordinate his contracts and logistics, along with experiments run at 11 external labs, and he handed other operations to the AI model. In under 18 months, Mithril advanced a possible treatment for one form of muscular dystrophy from a concept to encouraging results in mice, Anthropic said. Tranbarger now works at Anthropic and intends to launch multiple additional programs. If his candidates pan out, Anthropic expects a drug could enter human trials as early as late 2028.

Mithril's main target is LAMA2-related congenital muscular dystrophy, according to The Next Web. According to The Next Web, Anthropic's technical report, which has not been peer reviewed, found that mice given one antibody design grew roughly twice as strong in grip as mice that went untreated.

Among the partners, scientists at Generate Biomedicines turned to Claude Code to engineer a truncated section of a CAR T-cell therapy, Anthropic said. One design came out roughly 70% shorter than the conventional form. In lab tests it enabled immune cells to produce about 10 times the number of receptors and showed stronger tumor-cell killing.

For Divergence Labs, which is building a therapy for food allergies, Claude produced around 35,000 antibody designs over roughly a month, Anthropic said. Three tested designs appeared to dislodge the allergy molecule IgE better than the existing standard drug.

At BigHat Biosciences, the lab produced and evaluated roughly 1,010 versions of two antibody fragments over about 10 weeks, Anthropic said. The strongest variants latched onto their targets with upwards of 10 times the affinity of the originals.

Enveda tested a Claude-based system on 1,061 pages of manufacturing records, Enveda said. Claude matched all 11 problems the human reviewers had spotted and flagged seven additional ones they overlooked. Review time dropped by 89%, down to under three hours from more than 25. Claude also drafted part of a clinical trial application in four hours, compared with roughly three months by hand.

The Column Group, a biotech investor, is setting up Pleiades, a new company that will use Claude to run its drug programs, according to The Next Web. Bristol Myers Squibb is using Claude to assess trial plans for an early-stage drug and estimate their chances of success. Anthropic and Bristol Myers Squibb plan to expand that work in 2027.

Anthropic had set up a wet lab in the San Francisco Bay Area in September to run physical biology experiments. Eric Kauderer-Abrams, its head of life sciences, said then that the company is not competing with pharmaceutical and biotech companies that bring drugs to market.

Bristol Myers Squibb unveiled a deal in May that will give more than 30,000 employees access to Claude under a separate arrangement.

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