Anthropic published on October 27, 2026 an update on its first results from using Claude in drug development, based on partnerships with six organizations: BigHat Biosciences, Bristol Myers Squibb, Divergence Labs, Enveda, Generate Biomedicines and The Column Group. The company also said it has begun its own drug-discovery programs, with the acquisition of Mithril Medicine.
The central point is the breadth of the work, not a single drug. According to Anthropic, drug-development bottlenecks are spread across the whole process — from target identification and molecule design to manufacturing, regulatory documentation and clinical-trial planning — and Claude was used at each of those stages, with different degrees of autonomy depending on the project.
What each partnership showed, according to Anthropic
At Generate Biomedicines, six scientists used Claude Code to propose new designs for a genetic component of CAR T-cell therapy, used against blood cancers and which the company wants to adapt for solid tumors. One design was about 70% shorter than the standard version and, in laboratory tests, let immune cells make roughly 10 times as many receptors, kill tumor cells more efficiently and stay active for longer.
At Divergence Labs, focused on food allergies, Claude turned the company's goals into a detailed plan and, largely autonomously, generated about 35,000 antibody designs in about a month. In early tests, three designs bound to IgE, the molecule involved in the allergic reaction, and 20 dislodged it from immune cells — three of them outperforming the standard medication in that test. The next step is to combine both arms of the design into a single drug candidate.
At BigHat Biosciences, Claude, connected to the company's lab data system, proposed changes to two antibody fragments. The lab made and tested about 1,010 variants in about 10 weeks. The best versions bound more than 10 times as tightly, the cancer-targeting lead stayed in solution 18 °C higher, and the longer-acting lead clumped more than 100 times more slowly.
At Enveda, the reported gain was operational: a system connecting manufacturing documents to Claude flagged, in tests over 1,061 pages, all 11 issues previously found by human reviewers, plus seven more. Human review time fell 89%, from over 25 hours to under three. Separately, Claude wrote the first draft of a regulatory document in four hours, versus about three months by hand, according to the company.
Bristol Myers Squibb uses Claude to assess clinical-trial plans for an early-stage drug and estimate the trials' likelihood of success, with expansion planned for 2027. With The Column Group, Anthropic is working on creating Pleiades, a company that will use Claude to run more drug programs than usual for a small team; its first Claude skill for assessing whether a drug target is worth pursuing was evaluated on 45 target-disease pairs.
Its own program, and the limits of the results
In its own program, Mithril Medicine, a one-person company founded by Cody Tranbarger and now acquired by Anthropic, develops treatments for two rare forms of childhood muscular dystrophy. Tranbarger used Claude to organize contracts, logistics and experiments with 11 external labs, and a possible treatment reached promising results in mice in under 18 months. If the candidates continue to hold up, Anthropic expects a drug to be ready to start human clinical trials as soon as late 2028 — a projection, not an approval or proof of effectiveness in people.
That limit applies to the whole update: Anthropic itself says the research is still early and mostly preclinical, meaning the candidates are for the most part not yet being tested in humans. The figures are results reported by the company and its partners in technical reports, with no independent evaluation published in the announcement. To widen researcher access, the company also announced Claude Science, a research workbench, credits for life scientists and a verification program for approved organizations, plus an open call for guest investigators.
Sources: Anthropic — Early progress on accelerating drug development with Claude; Unite.AI — Anthropic Reports Early Drug Development Progress With Claude; Becker's Hospital Review — Anthropic buys drug startup, reports Claude results with 6 partners.
Image credit: a biomedical research technician pipetting a sample for a translational therapeutic study at the University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine (University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine Photo/Dan Naylor), via Wikimedia Commons. The image is illustrative of laboratory work and does not show an Anthropic laboratory.
Transparency: this article was produced with the assistance of artificial intelligence, cross-checked against public posts and the internet sources listed above. The results are preliminary and mostly preclinical; consult the original sources before drawing conclusions about treatments. No drug mentioned here is presented as an approved treatment.
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