On October 27, 2026, Anthropic’s life sciences team published a report on early progress using Claude to speed up drug development. Anthropic says the work is “still at an early stage” and mostly preclinical, meaning not yet tested in humans. The results below are Anthropic’s own account of specific partner programs, not independent findings, and nothing here is medical advice.
What to know
- Generate Biomedicines: Anthropic says six scientists used Claude Code to propose new designs for one part of a CAR T-cell therapy. One design was about 70% shorter than the standard version, and in lab tests Anthropic says it let immune cells make “roughly 10 times as many receptors”.
- Divergence Labs: Anthropic says Claude generated about 35,000 antibody designs in roughly a month for a food-allergy project.
- BigHat Biosciences: about 1,010 antibody-fragment variants were made and tested over about 10 weeks, and Anthropic says the best versions bound more than 10x more tightly than the originals.
- Enveda: on 1,061 pages of manufacturing documentation, Anthropic says Claude caught all 11 issues human reviewers found and flagged seven more. It reports human review time fell 89%.
- Others: the post also covers The Column Group’s new company Pleiades, Bristol Myers Squibb (clinical trial planning, with the collaboration planned to expand in 2027) and Mithril Medicine, which Anthropic acquired.
- Availability: Anthropic lists Claude Science (an AI workbench for researchers), Claude credits for life scientists, a Life Sciences Verification Program and an open call for guest investigators.
Why it matters
Most of the examples are about reviewing, planning and checking large volumes of material, which is also where everyday users get value from an assistant. For prompts that work on long documents, see how to prompt AI to review long documents. For the tool itself, see the Claude page and which Claude 5.5 model to use.
Source: Anthropic. We summarise in our own words; check the source for the full details.