Novo partners with Anthropic to speed up drug development with Claude

Sept 16 (Reuters) - Novo Nordisk has partnered with Anthropic to use the AI giant's Claude ‌models to speed up discovery and development ‌of new medicines, the companies said on Wednesday.

• ​The Danish drugmaker will initially test Anthropic models and Claude Science in its research and development workflows, and address scientific problems where their joint capabilities can ‌have the greatest ⁠impact, they said.

• "But beyond this, AI tools can also offer completely new scientific opportunities ⁠and aid reasoning and understanding of human biology and drug mechanics," Novo CEO Mike Doustdar said.

• Drugmakers ​are increasingly ​turning to artificial intelligence ​to accelerate R&D and ‌improve efficiency across their pipelines.

• The Wegovy maker will also use Anthropic's frontier models to strengthen AI-driven software development.

• "By giving leading researchers access to safe, capable, and trusted frontier models, we can shorten research ‌timelines, improve outcomes, and discover ​medicines and treatments that significantly ​improve human life," ​said Dario Amodei, CEO of Anthropic.

• ‌Meanwhile, AI industry leaders are ​split over how ​fast companies should develop the increasingly powerful technology.

• Novo already uses Claude to automate trial ​report generation, and ‌trim timelines for patient documentation creation from ​months to minutes.

(Reporting by Sriparna Roy in Bengaluru; ​Editing by Leroy Leo)