Anthropic (@AnthropicAI) is expanding into drug discovery, including research targeting rare childhood forms of muscular dystrophy. Binance (@binance) co-founder Changpeng Zhao (@cz_binance),
Anthropic (@AnthropicAI) is expanding into drug discovery, including research targeting rare childhood forms of muscular dystrophy. Binance (@binance) co-founder Changpeng Zhao (@cz_binance), widely known as CZ, called the development encouraging. He also pointed to what he sees as the main obstacle: a clinical trial and regulatory approval process that can take around a decade.
Anthropic said it has started drug discovery efforts of its own, including programs for rare childhood forms of muscular dystrophy.It has acquired Mithril Medicine, a one-person company that had been developing treatments for two rare forms of muscular dystrophy.Mithril's founder, Cody Tranbarger, used Claude to organize contracts, logistics and experiments with 11 external labs.
According to Anthropic, Mithril took a possible treatment for one form of muscular dystrophy from an idea to promising results in mice in less than 18 months. The results are still early. Anthropic expects a drug could enter human trials as soon as late 2028 if the candidates hold up.
The company is also working with outside partners. They are BigHat Biosciences, Bristol Myers Squibb, Divergence Labs, Enveda, Generate Biomedicines and The Column Group.The work ranges from antibody design to clinical trial planning, according to The Information.Most of the work is still preclinical, meaning most drug candidates have not yet been tested in humans.
CZ's point is that faster discovery does not remove the slowest stages of the process. A study in JAMA Network Open looked at FDA approvals from 2015 to 2022. It found median clinical development times of 7.2 years for approvals using no expedited program, versus 6.0 years for those using at least one.
Approvals using accelerated approval (4.9 years) and breakthrough designation (5.2 years) had significantly shorter median clinical development times. Fast track (6.6 years) did not show a significant difference. Those figures cover clinical development alone. Combined clinical development and review times had a median of 8.3 years for approvals with no expedited program.
CZ also floated using AI to review applications, including the possibility of competing AI providers handling the task. The idea targets the regulatory side of the pipeline, which he identified as a hurdle that AI-driven discovery alone does not solve. No regulator has announced such an approach, and the proposal remains a suggestion rather than a policy.
For now, Anthropic's research remains early. Any treatment would still need to pass human trials and regulatory review before reaching patients.
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