Anthropic has announced that it has made progress in creating a drug against 'scorpion venom' using AI.

Anthropic has announced that it used Claude to design proteins and created 17 types that may be able to block the effects of scorpion venom.

How Claude designed proteins that bind to scorpion nerve toxins — Anthropic

Scorpion venom can bind to proteins in the body and cause the release of large amounts of stress-related chemicals, such as adrenaline. One way to stop this is to use another protein that binds to the venom before the venom can attach to the body's own proteins. Anthropic's research team decided to use Claude to design a protein that could bind to the venom.

The research team used an internal research model to identify the target nerve toxin, gave Claude tools for designing proteins and predicting how they fold, and set standards for judging the results. After receiving the first instructions, Claude continued working on its own for 24 hours. Based on the results, the team gave Claude four more instructions in total and carefully checked its work.

In the end, Claude created 318,484 designs and selected 180 final candidates. By this stage, it had used about 10,000 GPU hours of computing time. With Claude's help, the research team added 31 more designs. They then asked research institutions that work with Anthropic to check whether the designs could actually bind to the toxin.

Of the 211 designs in total, 17 met the standards for binding to the toxin. However, the researchers checked this using only the toxin's gene. They did not test the designs in cultured cells or live animals. Anthropic therefore explains: 'We have not confirmed whether these binding molecules neutralize scorpion venom in a cellular environment, so we do not claim to have developed an antitoxin.'

Anthropic points out that 'if AI can design binding molecules for hard-to-target toxins in days and verify them in the laboratory within weeks, it could theoretically accelerate the discovery of treatments for toxin-induced harm and other diseases.' To help other researchers build on this work, Anthropic has made all 211 designs and the data from the binding tests publicly available at the following link.

Anthropic/scorpion-toxin-binder-design · Datasets at Hugging Face
https://huggingface.co/datasets/Anthropic/scorpion-toxin-binder-design