Research ·
Claude in drug development: six partners and 89% less document review time
Anthropic has described early results from work with six drug developers, including Bristol Myers Squibb. The most concrete gain came from Enveda, where document review fell from over 25 hours to under three. The figures are the partners' own.
On 27 October 2026 Anthropic published the first results of its life sciences programme. It works with six drug developers: BigHat Biosciences, Bristol Myers Squibb, Divergence Labs, Enveda, Generate Biomedicines and The Column Group. The company stresses that the work is early and mostly preclinical, and that the results come from the partners themselves and are not independently verified.
For companies outside pharma, the most instructive case is Enveda. Its manufacturing chemists reportedly spend up to 75% of their time on paperwork. On 1,061 pages of documentation Claude caught all 11 issues human reviewers found and flagged seven they had missed. Human review time fell by 89%, from over 25 hours to under three. Drafting one regulatory document took four hours instead of about three months by hand.
On the lab side, Generate Biomedicines used Claude Code to design a genetic component for CAR T cells that was about 70% shorter, and in tests it let cells make roughly ten times as many receptors. Divergence Labs had about 35,000 antibody designs generated against food allergies in around a month. BigHat tested roughly 1,010 variants in ten weeks, and the best bound more than ten times more tightly.
Bristol Myers Squibb uses Claude to assess early clinical trial plans and estimate their chance of success, and plans to expand the collaboration in 2027. Anthropic also acquired Mithril Medicine, which is developing treatments for two rare forms of muscular dystrophy. A drug could be ready for human trials as soon as late 2028.
What it means for companies
The main lesson for European companies has nothing to do with drugs: the largest measurable gain was in reviewing and drafting documents, work that manufacturers, accounting firms and law offices know well. We build this kind of task as AI invoice processing and document extraction or over internal policies as an AI knowledge base. What matters is that the AI only proposes corrections and a person approves them, as at Enveda. Before you start, an AI audit and consulting session picks the task with the fastest payback. We show a prototype for free within 3 working days, and projects start from EUR 5,000.
Sources: Anthropic: Early progress on accelerating drug development with Claude