Anthropic says Claude helped design 211 minibinders against scorpion neurotoxins, with 17 meeting binding criteria in lab tests.
Anthropic said on Oct. 20, 2026 that an internal Claude research model helped design protein minibinders against scorpion neurotoxins, with 17 of 211 lab-tested designs meeting the company’s binding criteria. The company said the work is a research demonstration rather than evidence of an antivenom, but argued it shows how AI could speed early-stage discovery for neglected diseases.
In the research announcement, Anthropic said Claude worked from one initial prompt and four follow-up prompts over 64 hours, operating mainly autonomously within Claude Science, while the company’s life science team supervised the campaign. The system generated 318,484 protein designs, selected 180 for testing, and the team added 31 more with Claude’s help, bringing the total to 211 designs. Adaptyv Bio and Twist Bioscience tested the designs for binding.
The campaign targeted five scorpion neurotoxins across four regions: Cn2 from Mexico, Ts1 from Brazil, AaH I and AaH II from North Africa, and LqhIII from the Middle East. Anthropic said the designs were aimed at each toxin’s channel-binding site, and that Claude also proposed multitoxin strategies, although none of the multitoxin designs met the company’s binder criteria for more than one toxin.
According to Anthropic, the 17 binders that met its threshold all bound single toxins, with seven against Cn2, four against AaH II, four against AaH I and two against LqhIII. The company said 11 of the 60 single-toxin designs were binders, a hit rate of 18%.
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