Anthropic launches Claude Science for drug discovery and neglected diseases research

Anthropic has launched Claude Science, an AI workbench for scientists designed to accelerate drug discovery, and announced that it will run its own preclinical drug programs focused on neglected diseases. The tool, which is currently in beta testing, unifies fragmented drug discovery tools and databases into a single research environment and ships with more than 60 curated skills and connectors spanning life-science disciplines. Anthropic said it is starting with a small number of early-stage, preclinical drug programs for diseases considered less attractive to the pharmaceutical and biotech industries because drugs to treat them would be less profitable.

Claude Science is available locally on macOS or Linux, or through a remote machine, and integrates tools such as PubMed, Jupyter and R. The application is agent-driven: a coordinating generalist agent launches specialist agents for tasks such as literature review, data extraction, structure analysis and cluster job orchestration. It includes connectors to life-science databases including UniProt, PDB, Ensembl, ChEMBL, ClinVar and GEO, supports 3D protein structure analysis, single-cell RNA sequencing analysis, CRISPR screen design, proteomics and cheminformatics, and can draft research plans adaptable to individual computing resources. Every output is accompanied by audit metadata — code, execution environment and message history — intended to make artifacts reproducible, and the stack integrates NVIDIA's BioNeMo.

Anthropic demonstrated that Claude Science analysed 100 rare genetic diseases in less than an hour and filtered 32 promising candidates for further computational screening. In another early example, a University of California, San Francisco researcher spotted viral contamination in minutes after it had been missed for a year. Early adopters say the platform has helped identify promising drug targets, automate literature reviews that once took years to complete and cut genomic analysis times.

Anthropic's head of life sciences said the company decided to run drug programs in the preclinical stage and choose indications for neglected diseases. "We're doing this because we believe first and foremost that to build the right models, products and tools to accelerate the industry, we need to live it along with all of you," he said. "We are fortunate due to our public benefit mission to be able to go after these neglected diseases that otherwise wouldn't be addressed." A spokesman said specifics about the research could not yet be provided because it was in early stages.

The launch follows Anthropic's October 2025 release of Claude for Life Sciences, a suite of plug-ins and connectors linked to scientific research platforms. Anthropic has also begun building its own specialised wet labs and acquiring companies in the biotech space. In May 2026, Anthropic partnered with Bristol Myers Squibb to roll out Claude to more than 30,000 employees. Sanofi's chief digital officer said, "Claude, paired with internal knowledge libraries, is integral to Sanofi's AI transformation. We're seeing efficiency gains across the value-chain, while our enterprise deployment has enhanced how teams work." The total value of AI partnerships in pharma rose 120% year-on-year between 2024 and 2025, according to GlobalData's Pharmaceutical Intelligence Center.