1 link tagged with all of: drug discovery + scorpion venom
Click any tag below to further narrow down your results
Links
Anthropic had an internal Claude model design small proteins meant to latch onto scorpion neurotoxins, then had outside labs test them. Seventeen of 211 designs bound their targets, a possible early step toward cheaper antivenom, though none have been shown to neutralize venom yet.
- Claude generated about 318,000 candidate designs and picked 180 for testing, mostly running autonomously over 64 hours with four human follow-up prompts.
- Of 211 tested designs, 17 bound one of four dangerous scorpion neurotoxins. None of the designs aimed at several toxins at once worked for more than one.
- Anthropic says binding is no longer the bottleneck; the hard part is turning binders into safe, affordable drugs, and they haven't tested whether these neutralize venom in cells.