Anthropic Uses Claude to Design Scorpion Toxin Protein Binders
Claude generated over 300,000 protein designs in 64 hours, yielding 17 lab-validated binders against neurotoxins from Mexican, North African, and Middle Eastern scorpions.
- Twist Bioscience and Adaptyv Bio synthesized and lab-tested 211 Claude-designed candidates out of 300,000 generated sequences.
- 17 of the 211 tested proteins met the criteria for binding dangerous scorpion neurotoxins.
- The binders succeeded against toxins from North African, Middle Eastern, and Mexican scorpion species, but failed against a Brazilian species.
- Anthropic released all 211 tested designs and corresponding lab validation data on Hugging Face.
Shows general-purpose LLMs can generate functionally active de novo protein binder candidates for biological research and antivenom discovery workflows.
