AI giant Anthropic buys Coefficient Bio for $400m

Anthropic has continued its push into the healthcare sector by acquiring New York start-up Coefficient Bio, a specialist in applying AI to drug discovery that was set up last year, but until now has been operating under the radar.

San Francisco-based Anthropic has not confirmed the deal, which was first revealed by The Information and independent tech journalist Eric Newcomer, and has subsequently reported to have paid $400 million for the nine-person company, which includes former Genentech, Roivant, and Evozyne staffers and is led by Aris Theologis.

Theologis, who was previously chief business officer at Evozyne, co-founded Coefficient with Nathan Frey and Sanuel Stanton, machine learning specialists previously employed by Genentech at its AI-powered drug discovery unit Prescient Design, and former Roivant executive Joyce Hong. It was incubated by AI-focused investment group Dimension.

There's very little information to be had on Coefficient's platform or approach – its website is just a landing page – but its objectives are reported to be developing a platform for target and drug discovery, as well as navigating regulatory requirements for development projects.

Given that the takeover (which, according to some sources including TechCrunch, has already closed) has come just months after Coefficient was formed, it seems that Anthropic is buying the talent to help spearhead its recent push into healthcare and the life sciences.

Last October, Anthropic launched Claude for Life Sciences, a group of large language models (LLMs) and an AI assistant designed to help researchers with tasks like writing code for statistical analysis, summarising papers, and generating testable hypotheses. The platform has since been expanded to include tools for clinical trials and regulatory functions in a bid to make it an 'end-to-end' toolkit for life sciences R&D.

Anthropic has already signed up a series of pharma companies to use the platform, including Novo Nordisk, Sanofi, and AbbVie, which is working with Genmab on a cancer project using Claude.

Anthropic's tech has also been adopted by the FDA, with the tech underpinning the agency's recently launched Elsa tool for drug reviews, but has had a major falling out with the Trump administration, prompted by the company's refusal to allow Claude to be used in military applications. In February, Trump said all federal agencies, including HHS, should no longer use the platform.

Earlier this year, the AI giant extended its healthcare offering with the launch of Claude for Healthcare, a suite of AI tools for health systems, payers, and patients designed to compete with ChatGPT for Health and Amazon's Health AI.