Anthropic said Tuesday that 17 protein designs made with Claude met laboratory criteria for binding scorpion neurotoxins, an early result in a field constrained by the cost of developing antivenoms.
The company tested 211 candidates aimed at differing combinations of five toxins. The qualifying designs attached to four of those targets. Binding does not establish that a protein can stop a toxin’s effects or protect someone from a sting.
Anthropic estimates that scorpions sting at least 1.2 million people a year and cause more than 3,250 deaths, mostly among children in areas with limited medical care. The company said treatment development is expensive and may not recoup its costs, discouraging investment. Existing antivenoms can be costly or scarce in affected regions.
The 211 lab-tested candidates included 31 added by researchers working with Claude. Claude chose the other 180 after generating 318,484 designs over 64 hours. Adaptyv Bio and Twist Bioscience conducted the binding tests. Citrini Research helped develop the prompts for the campaign; EconoTimes previously covered the laboratory costs of Citrini’s AI drug-discovery experiment.
No binder qualified for Ts1. Of the 17 that qualified, seven targeted Cn2, four each targeted AaH I and AaH II, and two targeted LqhIII. The five toxins are associated with scorpions from Mexico, Brazil, North Africa and the Middle East. Only Adaptyv Bio assessed LqhIII. Each successful design bound one target, and no design intended for multiple targets qualified against more than one.
The assays used recombinant toxins made in a laboratory. Binding to toxins isolated from venom remains untested, as does the candidates’ ability to stop toxin activity in cells or protect animals. Anthropic cited earlier research in which designed proteins neutralized snake toxins and protected mice, but the scorpion designs have not reached that stage.
In comments published by Anthropic, Susana Vázquez Torres, a postdoctoral researcher at the Spanish National Cancer Research Centre, described the work as an early step and said any eventual treatment would need to be safe, affordable and accessible.
Anthropic is making the 211 tested designs and their binding results available to researchers. It proposed checking binding to venom-derived toxin, testing effects in cells and then assessing protection in mice. No date for those tests has been announced.
