Anthropic Buys One-Person Biotech to Prove Claude Can Make Drugs | PYMNTS.com

Running real drug programs shows Anthropic where Claude holds up and where it fails, the company said. The programs also give it case studies to share with other biotechs, and medicines of its own if the candidates work. Tranbarger has joined the company and plans to start several more programs.

Mithril isn't Anthropic's first biotech deal this year. The company bought Coefficient Bio, a startup of fewer than 10 people building tools to plan drug research and manage clinical regulatory strategy, for about $400 million, PYMNTS reported in April.

Mithril's lead antibody has been tested only in mice. Anthropic said the work remains mostly preclinical and that it will extend Claude into clinical trials as the programs advance. A drug could be ready for human trials as soon as late 2028, the company said.

OpenAI Buys Orchestra Bio to Track Drug Workflows

OpenAI is betting on a different part of the job. The model provider agreed Oct. 20 to acquire Orchestra Bio, a platform where scientists hand study monitoring and timeline tracking to AI agents. The process Orchestra tracks is a long one. Moving a drug from target discovery to regulatory approval takes 10 to 15 years, PYMNTS reported in April.

Orchestra Bio's agents watch studies and timelines across a drug program. When a manufacturing batch fails and threatens the start of a clinical trial, the agents work out which activities and dates are affected, pull the relevant information and lay out the options, OpenAI said. Scientists and program leaders decide what to do.

Orchestra joins Rosalind, the line of AI tools OpenAI sells to drug researchers. Amgen, Moderna and Thermo Fisher Scientific are among the companies working with OpenAI on its GPT-Rosalind model, PYMNTS reported. Orchestra is a 4-year-old startup that had raised about $20 million from Andreessen Horowitz, Atria and 8VC, TechCrunch reported.

Enveda Cuts 26 Hours of Batch-Record Review to Three

The savings showing up first are in paperwork. Enveda, a biotechnology company that uses AI to turn nature's chemistry into new medicines, works with Anthropic on the manufacturing records a drugmaker must file before it can run a clinical trial. Its chemists had been spending up to 75% of their time on documents, Anthropic said.

The Claude-based tool Enveda built caught all 11 issues human reviewers had found across 1,061 pages, flagged seven they missed and cut review time from almost 26 reviewer-hours to just under three, an 89% reduction for this use case, Enveda said.

Healthcare buyers are already budgeting for that kind of work. In the PYMNTS Intelligence report "Enterprise AI Gains Ground, but Scale Remains Uneven," a survey of 60 senior technology executives at U.S. enterprises with at least $1 billion in revenue, 84% of healthcare firms expected to increase AI spending over the next 12 months and none expected to spend less.

The S-1 Anthropic filed Oct. 26 lists "healthcare and life sciences" first among the new markets it intends to enter, in a sector where global pharmaceutical spend is expected to exceed $2 trillion in 2026. Nine of the 10 largest pharmaceutical companies are customers, according to the filing, which does not name them. The company has told potential investors that its healthcare and biology work will improve public sentiment toward AI, PYMNTS reported in August, citing The Wall Street Journal.