Anthropic buys a one-person biotech and starts its own drug programmes

Anthropic has acquired Mithril Medicine, a one-person company developing treatments for two rare forms of muscular dystrophy. The company announced the deal in a blog post on Tuesday. Mithril’s founder, Cody Tranbarger, has joined Anthropic. It did not disclose the terms, The Information reported.

Anthropic said it has also begun drug discovery efforts of its own. In the same post, it published early results from research partnerships with six organisations. They are 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

Tranbarger used Claude to organise contracts, logistics and experiments with 11 external labs, according to Anthropic. He also handed many other parts of Mithril’s operations to Claude.

Anthropic said Mithril took a possible treatment from an idea to promising results in mice in less than 18 months. Its main target is LAMA2-related congenital muscular dystrophy, according to Anthropic’s technical report. The report has not been peer reviewed. In it, mice treated with one antibody design developed about twice the grip strength of untreated mice.

If the candidates hold up, a drug could start human clinical trials as soon as late 2028, Anthropic said. Tranbarger plans to start several new programmes at the company.

What the six partners reported

At Generate Biomedicines, scientists used Claude Code to redesign part of a CAR T-cell cancer therapy. One design was about 70% shorter than the standard version. In lab tests, it let immune cells make roughly 10 times as many receptors. It also killed tumour cells more efficiently, according to Anthropic.

Divergence Labs is working on a food allergy treatment. For the company, Claude generated roughly 35,000 antibody designs in about a month, largely on its own. Three tested designs appeared to dislodge the allergy molecule IgE better than the standard medication, Anthropic said.

At BigHat Biosciences, Claude proposed changes to two antibody fragments. BigHat’s lab then made and tested about 1,010 variants in about 10 weeks. The best versions bound more than 10 times more tightly than the originals, Anthropic said.

Enveda connected its manufacturing records to Claude and tested the system on 1,061 pages. It caught all 11 issues human reviewers had found, plus seven they had missed, Enveda said. Review time fell by 89%, from almost 26 hours to just under three.

Claude also drafted part of a clinical trial application in four hours. A comparable draft took about three months by hand at Enveda.

“Our work with Anthropic shows that AI can also help remove downstream bottlenecks in development.” Viswa Colluru, founder and CEO, Enveda

The Column Group, a biotech investor, is setting up a new company, Pleiades, that will use Claude to run its drug programmes. Bristol Myers Squibb is using Claude to assess trial plans for an early-stage drug. It also uses Claude to estimate their chances of success. The two companies plan to expand that work in 2027.

Still mostly preclinical

Anthropic said the research is early and mostly preclinical. For the most part, the drugs have not reached human testing. The company plans to “scale this work up substantially”, according to the post.

The announcement follows Anthropic’s Nasdaq IPO filing on Monday. In that filing, Anthropic named AI’s potential to discover new cures first among its greatest benefits, The Information reported. The company paid $400 million for Coefficient Bio in April. It launched Claude Science, its workbench for researchers, in June. In August, it said Claude had designed working protein binders.