Anthropic announced the acquisition of Mithril Medicine, a biotech startup with only one full-time employee, to demonstrate the capabilities of its Claude large language model in drug discovery. The company stated that the purchase allows it to run real-world drug programs, providing data on where the model succeeds and where it fails. This move follows a similar acquisition in April, when Anthropic bought Coefficient Bio for approximately $400 million.
Mithril Medicine and Claude Drug Discovery
Cody Tranbarger, the founder and sole employee of Mithril Medicine, used Claude to manage contracts, logistics, and experiments across 11 external laboratories. The model helped delegate business tasks and organize research, allowing the startup to take a candidate for a muscular dystrophy treatment from initial idea to promising results in mice in under 18 months. Tranbarger has joined Anthropic and plans to launch several new research programs.
The lead antibody developed by Mithril has only been tested in mice so far. Anthropic noted that the work remains mostly preclinical. The company intends to extend Claude into clinical trials as the programs advance. A drug candidate could be ready for human trials as early as late 2028, according to the company.
OpenAI and AI Clinical Trials
While Anthropic focuses on the creation of new treatments, OpenAI is targeting the management of drug development timelines. On October 20, OpenAI agreed to acquire Orchestra Bio, a platform that uses AI agents to track study monitoring and timelines. The acquisition adds to OpenAI’s Rosalind line of AI tools for drug researchers, which already includes partnerships with Amgen, Moderna, and Thermo Fisher Scientific.
Orchestra Bio’s agents monitor studies and adjust timelines when disruptions occur. For example, if a manufacturing batch fails, the agents identify which trial dates are affected and outline options for the team. Scientists and program leaders make the final decisions. Orchestra Bio, a four-year-old startup, had raised about $20 million from investors including Andreessen Horowitz and 8VC.
Healthcare AI Spending and Efficiency
Efficiency gains are already visible in administrative tasks. Enveda, a biotechnology company that uses AI to develop medicines from natural chemistry, partnered with Anthropic to review manufacturing records required before clinical trials. The review process previously took nearly 26 hours. The Claude-based tool reduced the time to just under three hours, an 89% reduction. The tool also identified seven issues that human reviewers had missed across 1,061 pages of documents.
Investment in this sector is growing. A PYMNTS Intelligence survey of 60 senior technology executives at U.S. enterprises with at least $1 billion in revenue found that 84% of healthcare firms expect to increase AI spending over the next 12 months. None of the respondents expected to spend less.
Anthropic’s S-1 filing, submitted on October 26, lists healthcare and life sciences as a primary market for expansion. The filing notes that nine of the ten largest pharmaceutical companies are customers. The company has told investors that its work in biology and healthcare will help improve public sentiment toward AI.
Source: PYMNTS
