Anthropic launches its own drug discovery programs to tackle diseases Big Pharma considers unprofitable

Anthropic is launching its own drug development program for neglected diseases that the pharmaceutical industry considers unprofitable. Novartis CEO Vas Narasimhan thinks AI could cut development time from twelve years to seven or eight and double the success rate from 8 to 16 percent.

Anthropic says the move aligns with its nonprofit mission and will help it build better AI models and tools for the broader industry through firsthand experience. The announcement (1:08:34) came during an event for the company’s new science AI tool “Claude Science”. The event also featured early examples of how AI could speed up medical research. A researcher at UCSF used Claude Science to spot a viral contamination in minutes that his team had missed for an entire year, according to Anthropic. The company also says Claude analyzed 100 rare genetic diseases in under an hour and flagged 32 candidates for computational screening.Ad Novartis CEO Vas Narasimhan said that getting a finished drug candidate from development to approval currently takes about twelve years. He broke the delays into three categories: information latency, operational latency, and biological latency.AdDEC_D_Incontent-1 New tools and models could sharply cut the first two categories, which account for roughly 40 percent of total development time. Biological latency, the time needed for animal testing, cell models, and human clinical trials, won’t shrink much. That could bring development timelines down to seven or eight years. Narasimhan also sees room to double success rates from 8 to 16 percent. Better safety predictions and optimized molecular properties could help, though the effect of improved patient selection remains unclear. The biggest challenge is still figuring out whether a drug target is biologically the right one for a given disease.Ad According to Narasimhan, even these seemingly modest gains would be huge when scaled across major pharma. Together, the big companies spend $150 to $200 billion a year on R&D and have produced only 800 to 1,000 drugs in 120 years. More diseases could be treated, and drug targets that were previously considered unreachable could become viable. Other AI companies are also pushing into medicine. Deepmind CEO Demis Hassabis co-founded Isomorphic Labs with Alphabet to apply AI directly to drug discovery.