Novo partners with Anthropic to speed up drug development with Claude

Novo Nordisk has partnered with Anthropic to use the AI giant’s Claude models to speed up discovery and development of new medicines, the companies said on Wednesday.

The Danish drugmaker will initially test Anthropic models and Claude Science in its research and development workflows, and address scientific problems where their joint capabilities can have the greatest impact, they said.

“But beyond this, AI tools can also offer completely new scientific opportunities and aid reasoning and understanding of human biology and drug mechanics,” Novo CEO Mike Doustdar said.

Drugmakers are increasingly turning to artificial intelligence to accelerate R&D and improve efficiency across their pipelines.

The Wegovy maker will also use Anthropic’s frontier models to strengthen AI-driven software development.

“By giving leading researchers access to safe, capable, and trusted frontier models, we can shorten research timelines, improve outcomes, and discover medicines and treatments that significantly improve human life,” said Dario Amodei, CEO of Anthropic.

Meanwhile, AI industry leaders are split over how fast companies should develop the increasingly powerful technology.

Novo already uses Claude to automate trial report generation, and trim timelines for patient documentation creation from months to minutes.

(Reporting by Sriparna Roy in Bengaluru; Editing by Leroy Leo)