Anthropic quietly sets up biology lab as it ramps AI drug program
At a time when fears of AI are gripping the public, the startup has built a wet lab, or place for physical experiments, in the San Francisco Bay Area, two people familiar with the matter said. Anthropic has said it wants to unlock treatments for rare diseases, and its biology work has gone beyond "in silico" or computer evaluations.
Anthropic, the artificial intelligence startup, has quietly established a biology lab in the San Francisco Bay Area to complement its work in artificial intelligence. The wet lab, or facility for physical experiments, is a step toward Anthropic's ambition to tackle rare diseases that pharmaceutical companies often overlook. Head of life sciences Eric Kauderer-Abrams confirmed the wet lab, stating that while computer evaluations have their place, real lab work remains essential for the final test of any biological research.
The startup's approach to biology work is similar to that of most biotech companies, involving both in-house and external collaborations. Anthropic's CEO, Dario Amodei, sees this effort as personal, given that a disease claimed the life of his father, but a cure came about relatively quickly. The company aims to apply rapidly evolving technology to biology while balancing the potential for significant acceleration with safety concerns.
Anthropic is hiring leaders to ramp up procurement and other operations, with the goal of speeding up progress in the life sciences by an order of magnitude.
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