Early progress on accelerating drug development with Claude

This is one application of AI that I’ve been hopeful for. Accelerating research into new medicines and cures to disorders, diseases, and cancers could be a net positive on human lives. Maybe it’ll help bring R&D costs down so that medicines for rare diseases aren’t out of reach for those that are afflicted by them.

> If Claude is to significantly increase the rate of new cures, we need to work with many more biotechnology firms and integrate Claude more deeply into their development processes.

Given all that, the wording here feels very self-serving. Cautious optimism is probably warranted.

Coming up with candidate drugs is the easiest part of the process. It’s possible that that could be improved a little (not sped up, but suggesting compounds in silico less likely to fail) and possibly have suggestions for scale up, but those are all hard, and the latter is less amenable to being “read” during trains phase.

This has been one of the target AI applications since the 1960s.

(Former drug developer who will never touch the life sciences again)

TBH, I am waiting for Mathocalypse-level progress in biology and medicine, but I guess that's not happening as fast, because it's the real world, human lives, etc., mostly etc.

I have a rare disease with no cure. Id love to see how Claude can help with us, but I'm cautious what it can really advance. Murine models still take time, and clinical trials are slow. I would think most biotech companies lose money at these stages.

>> If Claude is to significantly increase the rate of new cures, we need to work with many more biotechnology firms and integrate Claude more deeply into their development processes

Sounds invasive.

'biology moves at the speed of life' is a fantastic quote that should ground everyone's expectations - unless there's a revolutionary advancement in simming life, do not think that we'll see the same pace of progress as we've seen in software engineering or maths.

It helps with bureaucracy and pipeline generation. That's valuable and frees up time and effort for scientists. But it's not generating new ideas or solving problems like in math/engineering.

The problem is that biology is like trying to reverse engineer alien technology to understand how it works. Math/engineering is more like building up complexity through well defined parts. Math/engineering is a heck of a lot more deterministic than biology. The ultimate bottleneck in biology in context of AI is well curated and breadth of data, not necessarily intelligence.

> Six Generate scientists used Claude Code to propose new designs for this part

“Generate scientist” … is that a real job like “prompt engineer”

I work at a university, and part of the job is helping researchers with AI. Our bio and chem researchers are starting to despise Claude because it's been actively getting worse over the last months with increasingly aggressive guardrails. Many of them gave up because they feel they can't do anything useful with it anymore. There's a verified life sciences program, yeah. Is it an easy, transparent process capable of handling the hundreds at just our institution? Not even close. Best ad for open models though, thanks Anthropic!

Crossing fingers for LSD 2.0

It's funny that a lot of the "helping" is just actually filling paperwork.

If that's the bottleneck maybe we need to rethink all the bureaucracy around the process instead of using AI to fill a document and then using AI to read it. That's just plain stupid.

I’m honestly a little surprised by the sparsity of examples? One example of improving an existing therapeutic (Generate Biomedicines), one example of speeding up an existing clever play in food allergies (Divergence Labs), one fairly generic lead optimization play, and then we get … Claude helped write better paperwork and documentation for Enveda?!

I know Anthropic are brilliant at knowing when to focus where, but I genuinely expected them to be talking about 3-5x more serious scaled up drug discovery plays at this stage.

Is this not a focus, or did the big plays not want to be part of a roundup post?

I’d love to read Derek Lowe from In The Pipeline eviscerate this.

(sarcastic) Not too long until we see designer babies by Claude?

I like how there's a giant "chapter picker" pinned at the top of the web page, but there are only two chapters and the second chapter is a tiny blob at the end of the article.

New cocaine?

The point about finding problems in documented processes (Enveda: manufacturing and filings) is unexpected but interesting. One of our civilizational problems is that the sheer volume of documentation has slowly exceeded capabilities of humans to produce it reliably and without flaws.

Same applies to construction projects, BTW.

[dead]

Claude, you are a senior drug dealer. Get me my fix, make no mistakes.