Claude designed protein binders against scorpion neurotoxins
anthropic.com28 points by artninja1988 3 hours ago
28 points by artninja1988 3 hours ago
I hope this produces some useful anti-venom that is cheaper and widely available. My kid was stung by a small bark scorpion on his thumb here in Arizona and I would not wish that experience on anyone. For hours afterwards he was in excruciating screaming pain, and he even lost his vision for while. That lasted about 24 hours and then it took weeks for him to recover feeling in his hand. Nothing seemed to help with the pain and there was very little we could do for him. I would love to have had a more available anti-venom, but apparently now it is so expensive they only keep it around for the very worst cases.
Unfortunately, available does not mean cheap these days. Parents (good ones anyway) would go into a decade of debt to prevent their child from having an experience like you just described. Drug giants see that as a business opportunity.
Can someone explain whether design of protein binders is an important rate-limiting step in drug creation (of which antivenom is a very small market)? Or AI-driven drug discovery in general? It feels like something that will definitely help the drug market but is nowhere near the rate-limiting step, but that's from my own researcher as someone without a background in it.
My understanding is that FDA trials (specifically phase 2 + 3) are the death valley for most drugs and finding a biomarker is something mostly done through a mix of gene bank scraping + looking at old biomarker databanks. The majority of the cost and time is in failed drugs that do not pass FDA trials (which average 6-7 years end-to-end).
Note: I am asking this in earnest. I am not trying to ask a leading question and saying it is not important at all.
My understanding is it is not - this is something we have models for, and there was a flurry of machine learning based drug discovery companies about 8-10 years ago. But they ran into the testing bottleneck real fast because they would spit out thousands of candidates for binders and so on that all needed to be tested in vitro before they could even start the real drug dev circuit. Furthermore the drugs need to be manufacturable and that's not a trivial problem.
It's nice to (as the blog post suggests) give the opportunity to non medical experts, say in this case a snake/venom research center, to pursue a problem and produce some realistic candidates that they could pay to test. I do think it's good to democratize what parts of the process can be, but it's more of a resource prioritization problem than a molecular design one.
While Clinical Trials are the most expensive step and have a 90% failure rate, it is not the *source* of the failures, it's just where failures are revealed.
Much of whether or not a candidate drug will succeed was determined all the way back in the design/discovery stage. If we can design better drugs, then we would enjoy a higher probability of success in the later clinical trials.
The single biggest improvement to pharma drug development would be from increasing the probability of success in clinical trials.
Is it fair to say the source of the failures is we simply do not understand the complex relationship between the drug design (chemistry, cell therapy, etc.) and the biology (the complete system of the living thing). If we could understand that relationship, we could design better drugs? I know this is very hand-wavy. Probably so much so as to not be a useful thing to say, but I'm just trying to understand.
The impression I have, which admittedly is purely as a layman reading articles, is that by far the rate-limiting factor in all drug creation is the cost of doing clinical trials in humans.
Your impression is correct. Clinical trials are the rate limiting step and the primary source of cost and risk.
So it’s ok for Anthropic to make new biologics … but it’s users cannot because it might end humanity.
Let alone the fact this doesn’t even appear to be peer reviewed either from Anthropic.
Yes, they _hope_ they can verify that the outcome of giving someone they trust a gun will not end in the end of the world.
I wouldn't trust you with a gun of mine... I don't know you.
Neat, but doesn't change anything about the fact that even with this protein design headstart nobody is going to pay for the human trials or the cost to produce and distribute the possible antivenom.
In practical terms this is like Claude designing you a new home. Cool, you now have blueprints for a new home. You can print it out and hang it on the wall of your studio apartment.
This sounds awesome but I wish these would be published in a peer-reviewed journal or something of that nature. I can't believe these press releases they put out, even though I'm sure it's an achievement.
They're trying to catch up to OpenAI which has been doing these a lot, but I agree, can we actually get them peer reviewed as a hard requirement? I think OpenAI would have some looked over by experts before posting their blog posts.
>> They're trying to catch up to OpenAI which has been doing these a lot
Sorry, what? OpenAI is "ahead" in math. Anthropic is "ahead" in life sciences, and even have their own wet lab.
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