🤖 Claude designed proteins against scorpion toxins
Anthropic published a report: its internal research model, Claude, nearly autonomously conducted de novo protein design against five scorpion neurotoxins. Of 318,484 generated variants, 211 were sent for synthesis; the campaign took approximately 64 hours; binding was confirmed in 17 proteins.
🌍 The LLM agent itself searched for structures in PDB and AlphaFold DB, selected binding sites, combined 12 design tools, and performed co-folding of 553,052 pairs—humans provided only the initial prompt and 4 clarifications. For biotech, this is a step toward scaling and reducing the cost of designing new proteins.
👤 But this is not an antidote: toxin neutralization was not tested on cells or animals, and all 91 multi-toxin candidates failed. All 211 designs and data are open on Hugging Face—available for download and verification. Source 1: https://www.anthropic.com/research/claude-scorpion-toxin-binder-design