Early progress on accelerating drug development with Claude

> like proposing initial designs for new molecules

James van Geelen Of Citrini research brought up a good point on a podcast this week, that designing the molecules is perhaps 10-20% of the effort in bringing a drug to market. We have more possible drug designs than ever get developed.

Whilst AI drugs might be more likely to pass phase 2 tests than others and AI might be applied to the rest of the process there are still big bottlenecks in the way of AI creating a radical change.

https://podcasts.apple.com/gb/podcast/monetary-matters-with-...

This is one application of AI that I’ve been hopeful for. Accelerating research into new medicines and cures to disorders, diseases, and cancers could be a net positive on human lives. Maybe it’ll help bring R&D costs down so that medicines for rare diseases aren’t out of reach for those that are afflicted by them.

> If Claude is to significantly increase the rate of new cures, we need to work with many more biotechnology firms and integrate Claude more deeply into their development processes.

Given all that, the wording here feels very self-serving. Cautious optimism is probably warranted.

Coming up with candidate drugs is the easiest part of the process. It’s possible that that could be improved a little (not sped up, but suggesting compounds in silico less likely to fail) and possibly have suggestions for scale up, but those are all hard, and the latter is less amenable to being “read” during trains phase.

This has been one of the target AI applications since the 1960s.

(Former drug developer who will never touch the life sciences again)

I have a rare disease with no cure. Id love to see how Claude can help with us, but I'm cautious what it can really advance. Murine models still take time, and clinical trials are slow. I would think most biotech companies lose money at these stages.

>> If Claude is to significantly increase the rate of new cures, we need to work with many more biotechnology firms and integrate Claude more deeply into their development processes

Sounds invasive.

TBH, I am waiting for Mathocalypse-level progress in biology and medicine, but I guess that's not happening as fast, because it's the real world, human lives, etc., mostly etc.

It's funny that a lot of the "helping" is just actually filling paperwork.

If that's the bottleneck maybe we need to rethink all the bureaucracy around the process instead of using AI to fill a document and then using AI to read it. That's just plain stupid.

It helps with bureaucracy and pipeline generation. That's valuable and frees up time and effort for scientists. But it's not generating new ideas or solving problems like in math/engineering.

The problem is that biology is like trying to reverse engineer alien technology to understand how it works. Math/engineering is more like building up complexity through well defined parts. Math/engineering is a heck of a lot more deterministic than biology. The ultimate bottleneck in biology in context of AI is well curated and breadth of data, not necessarily intelligence.

This looks a lot like individuals and organisations willingly, or reluctantly, helping increase training datasets and transferring expertise to AI companies whilst paying for the privilege.

Seems kind of stupid, because AI companies aren't cuddly benevolent family members, they want to eat everyone's lunch.

> Six Generate scientists used Claude Code to propose new designs for this part

“Generate scientist” … is that a real job like “prompt engineer”

'biology moves at the speed of life' is a fantastic quote that should ground everyone's expectations - unless there's a revolutionary advancement in simming life, do not think that we'll see the same pace of progress as we've seen in software engineering or maths.

"beyond the most commonly discussed applications of AI, like proposing initial designs for new molecules". at this stage it's all waffle, all marketing, all hope. i don't know why we share these posts, it's just marketing

This is really cool, and so far also just seems to be the model of funding science and discovery that the US government and other grant making entities follow thus far. Submit for RFP to do X with Y. At ANL for example it was (and still is in Computing), use our HPC resources to accelerate your research (after of course review and approval of proposals).

Other large companies and foundations have copied this model and I would presume have given much more latitude in coloring outside the lines without red tape. Beyond that I am curious what will be innovative about this (sure, claude is amazing, but there's nothing stopping another grant making organization from saying here's a bunch of money and compute - hire great people and go wild)

This was always one of the main reasons for accelerating AI. I really hope there is soon a moment for AI drug development similar to the recent AI math advances.

Anthropic: “We’re worried there’s a 10%+ chance AI will kill all humans with a biological agent”

Also Anthropic: “we’ve given AI a biological lab to develop chemicals that impact humans!”

If they are serious on this, they will work on lab robotics and fancier and fancier organoids for automatic testing.

(No one please propose automated mice testing or the EAs will have an aneurysm, haha.)

Crossing fingers for LSD 2.0

Finding and designing new drugs is a long process, but it is the least cumbersome and expensive part of the process (as opposed to human trials which run on average upwards of 4x as long and cost 10-50x as much as preclinical).

And what we need is not simply more biological phenotypical data (such as genomics, biomarkers, etc.) that we can plug into a model. We actually need that AND labeled trial outcomes, which is a challenge in and of itself because pharma companies will often hide negative trial results (which are advantageous for training the model layer) in order to exacerbate the perception of drugs that make it to market (search for "missing data phenomenon pharma"). The clinical trials are an extremely costly (and necessary) market inefficiency that leads to a bunch of bad behavior that is unfortunately self-reinforcing. I spoke on the phone with a biotech entrepreneur who told me to think of the Gavin Belson (from Silicon Valley the TV show) quote where he says "I don't know about you, but I don't want to live in a world where someone other than me makes the world a better place better than me", and to just remember that's how many people think in pharma and biotech + pharma.

Augmenting how pharma companies work is a great first step. Augmenting how candidate drugs are engineered is a good first step. But that does not change the fact that we simply do not have deterministic governing laws (as we do in physics) to understand the complete pharmacokinetics/dynamics of a drug across a large patient population. You just have to run the test. It is true that AI will help, but only as much as we have a reasonable way to predict that candidate drugs will lead to positive trial outcomes and a large market.

Note that I am not a doomer here. I think AI will have a profoundly disruptive and positive impact on the pharma industry. I'm just not sure starting with drug design alone leads to hope unless there are things happening in the background between pharma + the labs (very possible) that could lead to better trial outcomes.

Yo Dawg , you love hallucination so we develop drugs with LLM.

Given that a lot of the bottleneck in speed is human trial, I wonder if overall speedup will be limited anyway?

Automating or streamlining human/animal trials with 24/7 monitoring and AI check-ins would be huge.

These companies probably have so much data on stuff that failed that there are likely so many gems and paths we haven’t tried out yet

(sarcastic) Not too long until we see designer babies by Claude?

I like how there's a giant "chapter picker" pinned at the top of the web page, but there are only two chapters and the second chapter is a tiny blob at the end of the article.

I work at a university, and part of the job is helping researchers with AI. Our bio and chem researchers are starting to despise Claude because it's been actively getting worse over the last months with increasingly aggressive guardrails. Many of them gave up because they feel they can't do anything useful with it anymore. There's a verified life sciences program, yeah. Is it an easy, transparent process capable of handling the hundreds at just our institution? Not even close. Best ad for open models though, thanks Anthropic!

I’m honestly a little surprised by the sparsity of examples? One example of improving an existing therapeutic (Generate Biomedicines), one example of speeding up an existing clever play in food allergies (Divergence Labs), one fairly generic lead optimization play, and then we get … Claude helped write better paperwork and documentation for Enveda?!

I know Anthropic are brilliant at knowing when to focus where, but I genuinely expected them to be talking about 3-5x more serious scaled up drug discovery plays at this stage.

Is this not a focus, or did the big plays not want to be part of a roundup post?

New cocaine?

The point about finding problems in documented processes (Enveda: manufacturing and filings) is unexpected but interesting. One of our civilizational problems is that the sheer volume of documentation has slowly exceeded capabilities of humans to produce it reliably and without flaws.

Same applies to construction projects, BTW.

the bottleneck is and likely will always be the phase-2 and phase-3 trials.

I don't believe there's any shortage of _potential_ new medicines being developed, but very few get to the stage where they are proven to be both safe and effective.

If anything Claude might just increase the downstream bottlenecks.

I’d love to read Derek Lowe from In The Pipeline eviscerate this.

if you try to ask Claude code any question related to molecular biology or biochemistry it will refuse to answer any of those questions.... the open models are the right step forward for any of this work. Same with computer security. The guardrails make the model unusable, and I would rather pay money to a more capable, open model that isnt going to put uuid fingerprints in my text and images it generates either btw.

Either Anthropic has solved everything - or it is a promo-hoax.

I won't judge which way, but I am getting tired of the repetitive nature here. Quite frankly, science works in large parts by others (independent) folks investigating any findings. Low quality or fake had been retracted in the past - see https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6... from 2016.

It is time for others to do a more systematic research of anything coming out from Anthropic here.

They have an IPO coming up guys, dont fall for the marketing that they're going to help you live forever with a language model. The body does not have a compiler to brute force or RL against.

This is complete nonsense. There is already plenty of ML in drug research, the bottleneck is not coming up with experiments its the testing and implementation of that testing (capital!!) Llms cannot contribute anything to this process that traditional ML hasn't already.

    > We’ve also created the Life Sciences Verification Program to allow trusted organizations to use our most powerful models with more permissive versions of our safeguards, which are necessary to prevent misuse but which can impede legitimate biological research

You can't contact anyone on this team. If you know someone who knows someone, then good for you! But if you don't, then sucks to be you.

You also can't get verified as a student, let alone as an independent learner or someone seeking to change careers, or heck just an entrepreneur with scientific interests.

Somewhere around March, Anthropic disabled their sales@ account as well. So you can't even email their sales.

I work a lot with younger scientists and people interested in science, and watching them navigate this ridiculous gatekeeping genuinely makes me sad. You can't use Claude to write grants without special dispensation from Anthropic, which is great if you're in California, but less so if you're in Tanzinia, Kazakhistan, Nepal, Bangladesh, India, South Africa, Brazil, Chile...

It's next to impossible for them to get support.

But at the same time, Anthropic can and does have a disproportionate impact on their lives. You can see that in what they brag about. Anthropic has actively bragged about blocking real research to make better painkillers and study a neglected tropical disease.

This is from their "Detecting and countering misuse of AI: September 2026" report. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49647300

Here's one case study they cited, this one was called, "Case study 3: Covert frontier model access for orthopoxvirus research"

    > In May 2026, our biological safety classifier blocked a request for Claude’s assistance in authoring a grant application for scientific funding. The work discussed in the application involved gain-of-function research (that is, research that genetically alters an organism to create a new or enhanced biological property) on the chikungunya virus. This gain of function research was aimed at the virus’ transmissibility and immune evasion properties.

What were the researchers using Claude for? What did they block?

"blocked a request for Claude’s assistance in authoring a grant application"

    > Chikungunya virus is a mosquito-borne virus that causes debilitating symptoms (such as severe pain and fever) that can last for weeks or months, and has no licensed therapeutic. And because chikungunya circulates naturally, a deliberate release (as part of a bioweapon) would be difficult to distinguish from a natural outbreak. The grant sought to identify enhancing mutations in the chikungunya virus, engineer them into infectious clones, and select for virulence in vivo. In other words, the virus would become progressively more harmful as it repeatedly infected live animals, with researchers keeping the most disease-causing variants in each round. Similar research could certainly be used in the development of better vaccines and therapeutics for the virus—but it could also be used to make the pathogen more dangerous.

What was the grant being written?

Note, "The grant sought to identify enhancing mutations in the chikungunya virus, engineer them into infectious clones, and select for virulence in vivo" [..] and then, "Similar research could certainly be used in the development of better vaccines and therapeutics"

It was most likely vaccine development. They stopped the study of a neglected tropical disease and vaccine development.

No Claude for the developing world, I guess.

For maximum charitability, they emphasize that they can't be sure because,

    > One of the reasons we were inclined to think this research was less innocuous was that the institutional affiliation associated with the grant was also a cause of concern. Although information within the application suggested that the research was pursued by civilian researchers, it was intended to be performed at a military research institute.

I would like to point out the most notable part, this account was used by "civilian researchers" at an "institutional affiliation associated with the grant was also a cause of concern" and the concern was that they were researchers at "performed at a military research institute."

In most parts of the world, there's either strict military control over BSL-4 labs, or a mixed military-civilian hybrid model.

I doubt that researchers working in the military side of these labs looking to weaponize things are writing grants with Claude.

I really want to be charitable here, but in general, it seems that they stopped people writing grants and reports for vaccine and therapeutics research and are claiming it as "possible efforts to build biological weapons."

Because – and this is the most charitable read here – are you claiming that you stopped a nation state - one with a large military - that has an institutional BSL-4 lab staffed with biologists from making bioweapons by blocking a scientist from using Claude to do grammar checks?

It's somewhat insulting that they termed a working scientist using their chatbot to write a grant as "uplift."

Because what is Anthropic saying here? Are they saying that the only thing stopping a military from a country like India, Russia, China, Iran, South Africa etc from making bioweapons --- a technology that's more than a century old, btw --- is whether or not they can use a Claude account to write grants?

I would be more than OK with their right to create such restrictions if they weren't lobbying the US Government and other Governmetns to restrict others, thereby ensuring that they control humanity's intellectual commons well into the future.

Because who are they to say what I can learn or can't learn? Who are they to control what I can or can't do with these tools?

Who are they to say who can use Claude to generate drug discovery targets or not?

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edit - I encourage you to paste the URL to this thread into a Claude Fable session. You will be blocked for "safety."

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