Novo Nordisk partners with Anthropic’s Claude to speed up drug discovery

Novo Nordisk is turning to Anthropic’s Claude models in a bid to cut the time needed to develop new medicines and bring them to market.

The pharmaceutical giant said Wednesday that the partnership will also put frontier AI to the test in the tightly regulated drug-development process.

The Danish pharmaceutical company announced the collaboration with Anthropic in a statement from its headquarters in Bagsværd, describing the partnership as a key part of its ambition to become, in its own words, “the world’s most AI-driven healthcare company.”

What the two companies agreed to

Under the agreement, Novo Nordisk’s scientists and computational teams will give Anthropic specific drug discovery challenges to work on. The two companies will then develop tools tailored to those workflows, according to their joint announcement.

The collaboration is focused on what the companies describe as biological reasoning, and this has the more extensive aim of ensuring Novo can identify and develop new medicines more quickly.

Novo Nordisk will also use Anthropic’s frontier models for software development. The drugmaker said AI-assisted coding will be an important step toward expanding the use of AI across the company at large.

The company will begin by testing Claude Science on selected research and development workflows, targeting areas where the companies believe the technology can have the greatest impact. The collaboration also includes data governance rules and human oversight to ensure the use of AI remains within Novo’s compliance and ethics standards.

Anthropic’s research leader Claude Science

Claude Science is Anthropic’s research workbench and not a particular new model. The Claude AI manufacturer said the tool runs on its existing Claude models, including Opus 4.8.

Claude Science connects to more than 60 scientific databases and includes prebuilt tools for genomics, proteomics, structural biology and cheminformatics, according to the statement. It uses a primary agent that can create specialized sub-agents to handle different parts of a task, while a separate reviewer agent checks citations and calculations before the work is finalized.

Early users at the Allen Institute and the UCSF Brain Tumor Center reported that Claude Science significantly reduced the time required for complex analysis, according to the same report.

Both CEOs look to improved outcomes

Novo president and CEO Mike Doustdar kept his pitch for the new partnership operational. He said,

“Joining forces with Anthropic will supercharge our R&D organisation and help us on our mission to bring new, transformative health solutions to people living with chronic diseases.”

He also added that AI can help increase productivity in R&D and reduce the timeline from research to marketed product.

Anthropic co-founder and CEO Dario Amodei said the growing capabilities of AI could dramatically accelerate progress in medicine and biology. “AI’s increasing capability brings with it the potential to compress a century’s worth of biological and medical breakthroughs into a decade,” he said in the announcement.

Novo keeps up AI deals trend

The partnership with Anthropic is not Novo Nordisk’s first move aimed at applying AI to drug development. The Wall Street Journal reported that Novo Nordisk reached a deal with OpenAI earlier this year to explore AI in drug development, while also establishing an AI innovation hub with Amazon Web Services.

The Novo Nordisk deal adds to Anthropic’s growing presence in the pharmaceutical industry, and the AI company had previously handed Bristol-Myers Squibb employees access to Claude for research and drug development.

Novo Nordisk, which says it employs more than 67,000 people worldwide, gives Anthropic another major pharmaceutical client as the industry continues to test how AI can be applied in practical drug development.