Anthropic has acquired Mithril Medicine, a one-person startup developing treatments for two rare forms of muscular dystrophy. The AI company also released early results from Claude-assisted drug development work with six outside organizations, it said Oct. 27.
The partners are BigHat Biosciences, Bristol Myers Squibb, Divergence Labs, Enveda, Generate Biomedicines and the Column Group. Most of the work is still preclinical, meaning most of the drug candidates have not yet been tested in humans.
At Enveda, manufacturing chemists had spent up to 75% of their time on paperwork. Claude reviewed 1,061 pages of manufacturing documentation and flagged all 11 issues that human reviewers caught, plus seven they missed. That cut human review time by 89%, from more than 25 hours to under three. Claude also wrote the first draft of a regulatory document in four hours, compared with roughly three months by hand.
Generate Biomedicines used Claude Code to design a CAR T-cell therapy component about 70% shorter than the standard version. In lab tests, the design let immune cells make roughly 10 times as many cancer-detecting receptors. Divergence Labs used Claude to generate about 35,000 antibody designs in roughly a month for a food allergy treatment, producing early hits in lab tests. BigHat Biosciences tested about 1,010 variants of two antibody fragments, based on changes proposed by Claude, over roughly 10 weeks.
Bristol Myers Squibb is using Claude to assess clinical trial plans for an early-stage drug and estimate the trials’ odds of success. The two companies plan to expand the work in 2027. “From a single prompt, Claude generated a robust initial analysis,” said Michael Pourdehnad, MD, senior vice president and head of early clinical development for hematology, oncology and cell therapy at BMS. Dr. Pourdehnad said the analysis would otherwise have taken days.
Mithril founder Cody Tranbarger used Claude to manage contracts, logistics and experiments across 11 external labs. He took one muscular dystrophy candidate from idea to promising results in mice in under 18 months. Mr. Tranbarger is continuing the research at Anthropic, which expects a drug could enter human trials as soon as late 2028 if the candidates hold up.
Anthropic said it plans to substantially scale the work and extend Claude’s role into clinical trials as programs advance.
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