Anthropic deploys Claude Science, an AI workshop for pharmaceutical researchers. The bustling AI startup says this new product goes beyond helping scientists do their work.
“Claude can lead the work — not help it, not accelerate it — even direct it,” Zubair Jandali, who leads Anthropic’s healthcare and life sciences sales team, said at a launch event Tuesday in San Francisco.
Claude Science is designed to bring together the databases, laboratory tools and computing power that researchers normally juggle between dozens of programs. Researchers can give the platform a single instruction, such as asking it to search for a promising drug compound, and it will perform the analysis, run the necessary computational tasks, and return the results itself.
Jandali drew a parallel with software development, where AI has moved from autocomplete to increasingly autonomous coding. Anthropic is betting that the same arc is now underway in life sciences labs.
The goal is to speed up the drug discovery cycle, which could mean faster access to treatments and lower costs in an industry that spends hundreds of billions of dollars a year to bring new treatments to market.
Novartis CEO Vas Narasimhan, who also sits on Anthropic’s board of directors, divided that timeline into three types of delays: informational, operational and biological. He thinks AI is already collapsing the first two.
“I think with the tools that you saw today, we can bring the information latency down to almost zero – I mean, the information will be at the scientists’ fingertips. The operational latency, we can probably reduce it significantly – it’s about organizing trials, organizing experiments, having all the work happen in a large organization. But I think the biological latency we’re stuck with. To actually run the experiment on an animal model and a model cellular, or in humans – that’s about 60% of that timeline,” Narasimhan explained at the event.
He estimated that AI platforms like Claude Science could help reduce the time to approval of a drug candidate from about 12 years to seven or eight years – and potentially double the pharmaceutical industry’s success rate, from about 8% to 16%.
Although Narasimhan believes the public health impact could be “massive,” he cautioned that one of the pharmaceutical industry’s most enduring challenges – determining whether a given biological target is actually the right one to pursue with a drug – remains largely unsolved by AI.
Another pharmaceutical CEO, Chris Boerner, who sits at the head of Bristol Myers Squibb – also warned against overselling the near-term potential of AI.
“We don’t want to get over our skis,” he said, emphasizing that talk of AI “curing cancer within our lifetimes” is the kind of promise the industry should be wary of making.
Still, he said the technology is already paying off in tangible ways — and he offered a window into what adoption looks like within a large drugmaker already using Claude.
Boerner said BMS now subjects all of its small molecule candidates, as well as a large portion of its large molecule candidates, to AI screening before they reach a wet lab. The company has set an internal goal of reducing drug development cycle times by 30% using AI tools – a goal Boerner said BMS is “on track” to exceed.
The launch of Claude Science comes at a pivotal time for Anthropic. The announcement is one of the company’s most ambitious moves in healthcare – a sector it is increasingly courting as it seeks to diversify its revenue beyond coding tools like Claude Code.
The stakes are particularly high as Anthropic prepares for its highly anticipated IPO. This is a period in which a sizable new customer base, such as that in the pharmaceutical sector, could be a major asset to the investor narrative.
The product launch also strengthens Anthropic’s rivalry with OpenAIwhich offers its own tools for pharmaceutical and medical research. In January, both companies deployed platforms for healthcare providers every week.
In May, Anthropic closed a 65 billion dollars Series H funding round, bringing its valuation to $965 billion.
Photo: BlackJack3D, Getty Images
