Anthropic buys a one-person biotech and starts its own drug programmes
Anthropic has bought Mithril Medicine, a company with just one employee that is developing treatments for two rare types of muscular dystrophy, a group of diseases that weaken muscles. Anthropic announced the deal in a blog post on Tuesday. Mithril’s founder, Cody Tranbarger, has joined Anthropic. The company did not reveal how much it paid, The Information reported.
Anthropic also said it has started its own efforts to discover new drugs. In the same blog post, it shared early results from research projects with six organisations: BigHat Biosciences, Bristol Myers Squibb, Divergence Labs, Enveda, Generate Biomedicines and The Column Group.
“There is no single problem to solve; the bottlenecks are distributed all throughout the drug development process.” Anthropic, in its blog post
A biotech with one employee
According to Anthropic, Tranbarger used Claude to manage contracts, organise deliveries and other practical tasks, and plan experiments with 11 outside laboratories. He also used Claude to handle many other parts of Mithril’s work.
Anthropic said Mithril took a possible treatment from an early idea to promising results in mice in less than 18 months. The main goal is to treat LAMA2-related congenital muscular dystrophy, a rare disease present from birth, according to Anthropic’s technical report. The report has not been checked by other scientists through peer review. In the study, mice given one antibody design developed about twice as much grip strength as mice that did not receive the treatment.
Anthropic said that if the possible treatments continue to show good results, a drug could begin testing in people as early as late 2028. Tranbarger plans to start several new drug development projects at Anthropic.
What the six partners reported
At Generate Biomedicines, scientists used Claude Code to redesign part of a CAR T-cell treatment for cancer. One design was about 70% shorter than the usual version. In laboratory tests, it allowed immune cells to produce about 10 times as many receptors, which help cells recognise and respond to targets. It also helped the immune cells kill tumour cells more effectively, according to Anthropic.
Divergence Labs is developing a treatment for food allergies. Anthropic said Claude created about 35,000 antibody designs for the company in roughly one month, doing most of the work on its own. Tests of three designs suggested that they could remove the allergy-related molecule IgE more effectively than the standard medicine.
At BigHat Biosciences, Claude suggested changes to two small parts of antibodies. The company then made and tested about 1,010 versions in its laboratory over roughly 10 weeks. Anthropic said the best versions attached to their targets more than 10 times as strongly as the original versions.
Enveda connected its manufacturing records to Claude and tested the system using 1,061 pages of information. The system found all 11 problems that human reviewers had identified, as well as seven more that they had missed, Enveda said. The time needed for the review fell by 89%, from almost 26 hours to just under three hours.
Claude also prepared a first draft of part of a clinical trial application in four hours. At Enveda, preparing a similar draft by hand had taken about three months.
“Our work with Anthropic shows that AI can also help remove downstream bottlenecks in development.” Viswa Colluru, founder and CEO of Enveda
The Column Group, which invests in biotech companies, is creating a new company called Pleiades. It plans to use Claude to run its drug development projects. Bristol Myers Squibb is using Claude to review plans for trials of a drug in early development and estimate the chances that those trials will succeed. Both companies plan to expand this work in 2027.
Still mostly preclinical
Anthropic said the research is still at an early stage and is mostly preclinical, meaning that it has mainly been done in laboratories or animals rather than people. Most of the drugs have not yet been tested in humans. The company said it plans to “scale this work up substantially”, meaning it intends to greatly expand these efforts.
The announcement came after Anthropic filed paperwork for a stock market listing on Nasdaq on Monday. In that filing, Anthropic named AI’s ability to discover new treatments as the most important item on its list of AI’s potential benefits, The Information reported. In April, the company paid $400 million for Coefficient Bio. In June, it launched Claude Science, a set of tools designed to help researchers work. In August, it said Claude had designed protein binders that worked, which are proteins designed to attach to specific targets.