Eric Kauderer-Abrams, head of life sciences at Anthropic, spoke to Reuters and cautioned that the company is not looking to go head-to-head with pharmaceutical or biotech companies.
The wet lab is intended to bring the company’s work to find treatments for rare diseases into the physical realm, Reuters reported Friday.
“We believe that to do biology, the final test is still and will be for a while in real lab work,” Kauderer-Abrams told the outlet.
He said the company is already doing that work today. “We absolutely are doing that today, and I would describe our approach as being typical of what you would see in most biotech companies, where there’s some amount of that that we’re doing in our own facilities and some amount of that that we’re working with external partners on,” he said.
Kauderer-Abrams said Anthropic hopes to “benefit the world,” and that the life sciences represent the company’s biggest opportunity to do so. “By far, we see the biggest opportunity for that in the life sciences, and that is motivating everything that we’re doing,” he said.
He also pointed to how early the effort is. “We’re in the very early innings of using AI to automate the execution of lab work,” he noted, calling it “an area that has the potential to bring about meaningful acceleration in so many different processes.”
The company claimed it would not run clinical trials, at least for now. “We’re not competing with pharma and biotech companies that make their business in bringing drugs to market,” Kauderer-Abrams said.
An Anthropic spokesman later told Reuters the lab was not specifically intended to discover new drugs.
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