Claude shows promise in cancer research, cuts drug development paperwork by 89%: Anthropic

Anthropic on Wednesday said its artificial intelligence model Claude could help speed up the development of new medicines as early projects have shown promising results in cancer research, food allergies and rare childhood diseases.

The AI company said that it had partnered with six organisations developing new drugs. It has also started its own drug discovery programmes.

Most of the work remains at an early stage and the experimental treatments have largely not been tested in humans.

"I think it will actually be possible to cure most human disease in ~5-10 years," he said in a post on X.

Amodei, who has a background in biology, has claimed that AI could transform medicine.

"The thing that will work is actually curing cancer," he said in August.

Anthropic's latest announcement offer an early glimpse of how the company hopes to turn that ambition into reality.

The company wants Claude to help across the drug development process, from identifying targets to preparing regulatory documents and planning clinical trials.

Early results in cancer and allergies

In one project, Generate Biomedicines used Claude Code to redesign part of the genetic instructions for CAR T-cell therapy, which has traditionally been used to treat blood cancers.

Generate Biomedicines wants to adapt it to treat solid tumours.

According to Anthropic, six Generate scientists used Claude Code to propose new designs for a section of the genetic instructions. One design was about 70% shorter than the standard version and performed better in laboratory tests.

Laboratory tests found that it helped immune cells produce roughly 10 times as many receptors used to recognise cancer cells.

The cells also killed tumour cells more efficiently and remained active for longer.

The findings could help researchers overcome some of the technical limitations involved in adapting CAR T-cell therapy to a wider range of cancers. However, laboratory improvements do not establish whether a treatment will be effective in patients.

In another project, Divergence Labs used Claude to develop potential treatments for food allergies.

Faster experiments and less paperwork

Anthropic also worked with BigHat Biosciences, which combines AI with automated laboratory testing to improve experimental molecules that could eventually become medicines.

The team produced and tested about 1,010 variants over 10 weeks.

The best versions bound to their targets more than 10 times as tightly as the original molecules.

The project suggests that AI could assist not only in proposing molecular changes but also in interpreting experimental data and refining how researchers assess potential drugs.

Claude was used by biotechnology firm Enveda to review manufacturing records and prepare regulatory documents.

Anthropic said manufacturing chemists at Enveda spent up to 75% of their time on paperwork.

The company built a system connecting its manufacturing documents to Claude, allowing the AI model to flag possible problems. In a test involving 1,061 pages of documentation, Claude identified all 11 issues previously spotted by human reviewers and flagged seven additional ones.

The system cut human review time by 89%, from more than 25 hours to less than three hours.

Claude also prepared first drafts of two regulatory documents. One took four hours to produce, compared with about three months using the conventional process. Human reviewers found one minor error in the other document, Anthropic said.

Pharmaceutical trials and rare diseases

Anthropic has also started working with pharmaceutical company Bristol Myers Squibb to improve clinical trial planning.

Claude is being used to assess plans for an early-stage drug and estimate the likelihood of trial success. The companies plan to expand the work in 2027.

"We use Claude at the clinical trial stage to analyze proprietary data, create a clinical study plan, and weigh the study's chance of success," Michael Pourdehnad, senior vice president and head of early clinical development for hematology, oncology and cell therapy at Bristol Myers Squibb, said in a statement.

Anthropic's collaboration with Bristol Myers Squibb is still at an early stage, and the company has not yet demonstrated that Claude can consistently increase clinical trial success rates.

Anthropic is also working with biotechnology investor The Column Group to establish a new company called Pleiades.

The company plans to use Claude to manage more drug development programmes than a small team would usually handle. The aim is to reduce research and administrative costs.

Anthropic hopes this could make it easier for investors to support riskier projects targeting diseases with limited treatment options.

The company has also acquired Mithril Medicine, a one-person business developing treatments for two rare forms of muscular dystrophy.

Mithril Medicine founder Cody Tranbarger used Claude to coordinate experiments involving 11 external laboratories and manage contracts and logistics.

Anthropic said the work took a potential treatment for one form of muscular dystrophy from an idea to promising results in mice in less than 18 months.

The company hopes a drug candidate could enter human trials as early as late 2028, if further research supports the findings.

The company has also launched Claude Science, an AI workbench for researchers. It is offering credits to life scientists and has introduced a programme allowing approved organisations to use its more powerful models for biological research.