Anthropic acquires one-man firm Mithril Medicine as it expands Claude's role in drug development

Anthropic has acquired Mithril Medicine, a one-person biotech that used Claude to help develop treatments for muscular dystrophy, as the AI lab continues its push to aid drug development.

In a Tuesday blog post, Anthropic said that it acquired Mithril to run its own drug research programs in-house, though it did not disclose the financial terms of the acquisition.

Mithril's 31-year-old founder Cody Tranbarger used Claude to organize contracts, logistics, and experiments with 11 external labs to develop treatments for two rare forms of muscular dystrophy.

"Now at Anthropic, Cody is continuing this research, and plans to start several new programs," the AI company said. "If his drug candidates continue to hold up, we expect a drug to be ready to start clinical trials in humans as soon as late 2028."

Anthropic also unveiled partnerships with six biotech and pharmaceutical firms - Bristol Myers Squibb, BigHat Biosciences, Divergence Labs, Enveda, Generate Biomedicines, and The Column Group (TCG). Through the partnerships, the AI company said it is exploring how Claude can support various stages of drug development.

TCG is working with Anthropic to develop a new Claude tool to assess whether drug targets are worth pursuing, which has been used to evaluate 45 target-disease pairs, the AI lab said.

With Bristol Myers Squibb, Anthropic is aiming to address bottlenecks in clinical trial planning. The pharmaceutical firm is using Claude to analyze clinical trial plans for an early-stage drug and estimate the likelihood of those trials succeeding.

"From a single prompt, Claude generated a robust initial analysis that helped inform our assessment of different development options, which would otherwise take days to complete," Michael Pourdehnad, senior vice president of Bristol Myers Squibb, said in the post.

Anthropic noted that most of the research remains at an early, preclinical stage.

"We plan to continue extending Claude’s role into clinical trials as these drug programs advance, and as we partner with more organizations whose drug development programs are already at the clinical stage," the company said.