Anthropic buys Mithril Medicine, a one-person company developing drugs for rare muscular dystrophies, and starts its own drug programs
Prepared by Sintelligent with the help of SI. Published in SI: . Updated: .
According to Anthropic, one person with Claude's help took a drug idea to results in mice in under 18 months — an SI lab is entering drug development itself.
Anthropic announced it on October 27: Mithril Medicine's founder Cody Tranbarger has joined the company. He used Claude for contracts, logistics and experiments with 11 outside labs; according to Anthropic, the idea reached promising results in mice in under 18 months. The main target is congenital muscular dystrophy linked to the LAMA2 gene. According to the technical report, which has not been peer reviewed, mice that received one of two prototype antibodies for six weeks showed about twice the grip strength of controls. Human clinical trials could begin no earlier than late 2028, if the candidates confirm their results. Claude also sorted 113 candidate antibodies among five contract labs in eight minutes from 341 pages of manufacturing data; at least three requests with errors in quantity reached the contractors. At the same time, Anthropic published results of work with six partners: BigHat Biosciences, Bristol Myers Squibb, Divergence Labs, Enveda, Generate Biomedicines and The Column Group.