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Claude enters the lab: Anthropic bets big on life sciences
Artificial intelligence start-up Anthropic is tailoring its Claude chatbot to researchers and life sciences companies, as AI groups race to create specialised applications from the technology. The San Francisco-based group said on Monday it is integrating Claude into tools that scientists already use, including lab management systems, genomic analysis platforms and biomedical databases, to tackle time-consuming tasks such as data analysis and literature review. Anthropic, which was valued at $170bn in September, said drugmaker Novo Nordisk has already used its AI model to cut clinical study documentation from more than 10 weeks to 10 minutes, while drug developer Sanofi said the majority of its employees use Claude every day. The move comes as tech groups are spending billions of dollars on AI products and models, believing the technology can benefit a range of industries from healthcare to energy and education. This has included a focus on the life sciences industry as top AI companies and start-ups bet on the potential for AI to speed up drug discovery and tackle disease. OpenAI and Mistral have recently announced new units focusing on scientific research. In February, Google unveiled a "co-scientist" tool that could help scientists come up with new hypotheses, and last week said its open Gemma model had helped discover a new potential cancer therapy pathway. "What I'm chasing is to bring to biologists the experience that software engineers have [with code generation]," said Eric Kauderer-Abrams, head of life sciences at Anthropic. "You can sit down with Claude and brainstorm ideas, generate hypotheses together." The company has seen success with its coding tool, Claude Code, which outperforms those of its competitors. Kauderer-Abrams said this helps give it an edge in the life sciences industry. "We're much more focused on amplifying the capabilities of individual scientists and building tools that accelerate the scientists' workflows than other companies are," said Kauderer-Abrams. He added that rival groups are trying to do that as well as directly doing science themselves. Some, such as DeepMind spin-off Isomorphic Labs, are trying to find their own drugs. However, so far, no drugs discovered by AI have been approved and many have failed in clinical trials. One hurdle has been getting enough data to create a general-purpose algorithm that can solve many different problems. Anthropic said it has made its models suitable for pharmaceutical research by bringing down the amount of times it produces "hallucinations" -- or factual errors. It has also offered audit trails for regulatory compliance and the ability to verify every insight against original sources. Kauderer-Abrams said the company was also banning requests related to prohibited agents, which could be used to make chemical weapons. The AI group's push into life sciences follows recent breakthroughs that showed large language models have the potential to help in scientific research. Last month, both Google DeepMind and OpenAI achieved gold medal-level performance at prestigious competitions for coding. Kauderer-Abrams said language models can take advantage of large existing and publicly available datasets in biology, such as ones on genomics and protein sequencing, which can be used to tailor the models for scientific research. "In life sciences, that's one area where pretty much everyone can agree that we can bring things that are unambiguously amazing," said Kauderer-Abrams.
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Anthropic launches Claude Life Sciences to give researchers an AI efficiency boost
Proxy advisor ISS recommends Tesla shareholders oppose Musk's $1 trillion pay plan Anthropic, which is one of the companies at the center of the AI boom, develops a family of large language models called Claude. It was founded in 2021 by a group of former OpenAI executives and researchers, and its valuation has swelled to $183 billion in just four years. The company launched a new model, Claude Sonnet 4.5, late last month and said it is "significantly better" at life sciences tasks like understanding laboratory protocols. Kauderer-Abrams said researchers have already been engaging with Anthropic's models to help with isolated parts of the scientific process, so the company decided to formally build out Claude for Life Sciences as a way to support them from start to finish. That meant Anthropic had to establish integrations with key players in the life sciences ecosystem, including Benchling, PubMed, 10x Genomics and Synapse.org, among others. Anthropic has also partnered with companies that can help life sciences organizations adopt AI, like Caylent, KPMG, Deloitte and cloud providers AWS and Google Cloud, the company said. "We're willing and enthusiastic about doing that grind to make sure that all the pieces come together," Kauderer-Abrams said. In a prerecorded demo, Anthropic showed how a scientist working on preclinical studies could use Claude for Life Sciences to compare two study designs that test different dosing strategies. The scientist was able to query her lab's data directly from Benchling, generate a summary and tables of key differences with links back to the original material. After reviewing the results, the scientist generated a study report that could be included in a regulatory submission. Anthropic said an analysis like this used to require "days" of validating and compiling information, but now, it can be done in minutes. Kauderer-Abrams said the company believes AI can bring about real efficiency gains for the life sciences sector, but it's also under "no illusions" that it will magically overcome the physical limitations of conducting scientific research. Clinical trials that take three years are not suddenly going to take one month, he said. Instead, Anthropic is focused on exploring the time consuming, expensive parts of the discovery process "piece by piece" to determine where AI could be most useful. "We're here to make sure that this transformation happens and that it's done responsibly," Kauderer-Abrams said.
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Anthropic takes aim at biotech with Claude for Life Sciences - SiliconANGLE
Anthropic takes aim at biotech with Claude for Life Sciences Anthropic PBC has had a busy start to the week, launching a new tool called Claude for Life Sciences to help with scientific research, and expanding the availability of its Claude Code agentic coding tool to the web and its mobile application. Claude for Life Sciences might be the more interesting of the two announcements, as it sees the company customize its most powerful artificial intelligence model to help scientists perform tasks like drug discovery more efficiently. The company said Claude has been redesigned to connect with popular lab tools that are already used by lab researchers. The announcement marks the company's first stab at life sciences. Claude for Life Sciences is meant to help researchers at each step of the drug discovery process, and will do this by reading studies, conjuring up theories, crunching numbers and even preparing submissions to regulators. Anthropic Head of Biology and Life Sciences Eric Kauderer-Abrams told CNBC in an interview that the launch marks a threshold moment for the company, which has decided to make a big investment in this area. "We want a meaningful percentage of all of the life science work in the world to run on Claude, in the same way that that happens today with coding," he added. To achieve this, Anthropic has created a number of integrations that enable Claude for Life Sciences to work with research platforms such as Benchling, 10x Genomics, PubMed and Synapse.org. With those integrations, scientists can pull data from those platforms directly into Claude without needing to fiddle around exporting files or switching applications. The company has also reached out to a number of consulting partners to help teach life sciences organizations how to make the most out of Claude, including Deloitte Touche Ltd., KPMG International Ltd. and Caylent Inc. Kauderer-Abrams, who only joined Anthropic a couple of months ago, said the company was encouraged by the fact that many researchers were already using the standard Claude model to aid in their research. It inspired the company to build a dedicated version of Claude for researchers, and also build the additional infrastructure needed for it, he said. Claude for Life Sciences is based on Anthropic's most powerful large language model Claude Sonnet 4.5, which is designed to perform better on tasks such as reading lab protocols and other science-related tasks. In a demo, the company showed how a scientist conducting preclinical studies can use Claude for Life Sciences to contrast two different dosing plans of a new drug. It allows her to pull data straight from Benchling, auto-generate tables, compare the differences and then update the information in the original system. Once done, she then used Claude for Life Sciences to generate a study report for regulators. The company said this kind of work would normally take several days due to the time it takes to manually compile the results and validate everything, but with Claude, it can be done in just a few minutes. However, Kauderer-Abrams was quick to point out that AI won't be able to speed up the entire drug discovery process. For instance, it's not possible for AI to speed up things like clinical trials, he said. Where Anthropic and Claude can help is in speeding up the more repetitive parts of scientific workflows, such as the painstaking analysis and comparisons, regulatory paperwork and so on. "We're here to make sure this transformation happens and that it's done responsibly," Kauderer-Abrams said. Anthropic's other update today involves Claude Code, the agentic coding tool that was previously limited to developer's terminals, but is now coming to its mobile app and the Claude.ai web app. The agent is launching on these platforms as a "research preview", and for now, access is limited to those users with Pro and Max accounts only, the company said. It's really just a new way for developers to interact with Claude Code, but Anthropic believes it will be handy, especially for developers who want the agent to run multiple, well-defined coding tasks in parallel. They'll be able to connect the agent to their GitHub repositories, tell it what to do, and then simply sit back and supervise their work as the new code appears in the web interface. The agent will run in the sidebar, while the list of assigned tasks will appear on the left. The company pointed out that each Claude Code session runs in its own sandboxed environment for security reasons, with all Git interactions flowing through a secure proxy service, which helps to make sure it can only access repositories it has authorization for. Claude Code recently gained a new capability that lets developers steer it while it's working on a problem, and this feature is available in the web and mobile apps, so they'll be able to guide the agent without having to interrupt its work, potentially avoiding having to start over on a task. "Instead of managing individual coding tasks one at a time, developers can now oversee a fleet of Claude Code instances with confidence they'll finish safely and independently," the company said. "It's less about watching Claude work and more about delegating to an entire team -- you assign the work, Claude handles the execution, and you review the results when each task completes." According to Anthropic, it has been leaning heavily on Claude Code itself, and the agent has helped to write around 90% of its own codebase. This has enabled its engineering team to boost productivity by around 67% in the last few months. Claude Code has also turned into a nice little earner for the company, generating an annual revenue run-rate of more than $500 million.
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Anthropic introduces Claude for Life Sciences, a specialized AI tool designed to enhance efficiency in scientific research and drug discovery. The move marks a significant step in AI's application to biotechnology and pharmaceutical industries.
Anthropic, a leading artificial intelligence startup valued at $183 billion, has launched Claude for Life Sciences, a specialized version of its AI model tailored for scientific research and drug discovery
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. This move marks Anthropic's first significant foray into the life sciences sector, aiming to revolutionize how researchers approach complex scientific tasks.Claude for Life Sciences is designed to seamlessly integrate with existing laboratory tools and platforms, including Benchling, PubMed, 10x Genomics, and Synapse.org
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. These integrations allow scientists to directly access and analyze data from various sources without switching between applications. Anthropic has also partnered with consulting firms like Deloitte, KPMG, and Caylent to facilitate the adoption of AI in life sciences organizations2
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.The AI model, based on Anthropic's powerful Claude Sonnet 4.5, is specifically tuned for life sciences tasks such as understanding laboratory protocols and analyzing complex datasets
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. In a demonstration, Anthropic showcased how Claude for Life Sciences can significantly reduce the time required for tasks like comparing study designs and generating regulatory reports from days to minutes2
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.Major pharmaceutical companies are already benefiting from Claude's capabilities. Novo Nordisk reported reducing clinical study documentation time from over 10 weeks to just 10 minutes, while Sanofi stated that the majority of its employees use Claude daily
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. Eric Kauderer-Abrams, Anthropic's Head of Biology and Life Sciences, emphasized the tool's potential to amplify individual scientists' capabilities and accelerate workflows1
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Anthropic's entry into life sciences AI comes amid increasing competition from tech giants and startups alike. Companies such as OpenAI, Mistral, and Google have recently announced similar initiatives focused on scientific research and drug discovery
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. While AI shows promise in accelerating certain aspects of research, Kauderer-Abrams cautioned that it won't overcome all physical limitations of scientific processes, such as the duration of clinical trials2
.Anthropic is committed to developing AI responsibly in the life sciences sector. The company has implemented measures to reduce 'hallucinations' or factual errors in its models and has established audit trails for regulatory compliance. Additionally, Anthropic has banned requests related to prohibited agents that could be used for malicious purposes, such as chemical weapons
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.As AI continues to transform the biotech and pharmaceutical industries, Anthropic's Claude for Life Sciences represents a significant step towards more efficient and innovative scientific research processes. The success of this initiative could pave the way for broader applications of AI in tackling complex scientific challenges and accelerating breakthroughs in human health.
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