Novo Will Work With Anthropic AI to Speed Drug Development

Novo Nordisk A/S and Anthropic PBC will work together to speed up drug development using artificial intelligence, a key goal as Novo tries to catch up in the cutthroat obesity market.

“Joining forces with Anthropic will supercharge our R&D organization,” Novo Chief Executive Officer Mike Doustdar said in a statement Wednesday, adding that the drugmaker has the ambition to “become the world’s most AI-driven healthcare company.”

Initially, Novo’s R&D department will use Anthropic’s Claude Science to tackle scientific problems identified by researchers where the companies’ joint capabilities are seen as having the greatest impact. The goal is to compress the path from research to marketed product, and ultimately to use AI to find “completely new scientific opportunities,” according to Doustdar.

Novo needs next-generation medicines to plug a looming revenue gap, with its Ozempic and Wegovy diabetes and obesity medicines set to face generic competitors in the US and Europe early in the next decade. In the shorter term, the Danish company is also trying to claw back market share from Eli Lilly & Co.

Financial terms of the cooperation weren’t disclosed.

Novo shares were little changed at 3:30 p.m. in Copenhagen. The stock has declined 15% this year.

The Anthropic partnership comes months after Novo agreed to integrate OpenAI’s artificial intelligence across the company.

Earlier this month, Anthropic revealed that people had used Claude in ways that could support the development of biological weapons, though it said the cases were ambiguous and the research could have been benign. Novo said its collaboration had been designed with “robust data governance and human oversight, helping ensure AI is applied responsibly.”

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