Anthropic, the San Francisco-based maker of the Claude AI model, recently acquired Coefficient Bio, a stealth biotech startup, for $400 million in an all-stock deal.
The deal marks the latest push by AI leaders into drug discovery, a space global pharma giants have been racing to claim. But as foundational AI models muscle into biology, what does this latest move mean for India's $55-billion pharmaceutical industry? Mint explains.
What's behind Anthropic's Coefficient buy?
Anthropic purchased Coefficient Bio in an all-stock deal, as reported by The Information last week. The startup was founded eight months ago by Samuel Stanton and Nathan Frey, both of whom worked at Genentech's computational drug discovery unit, Prescient Design. Genentech is, in turn, owned by Roche.
Coefficient Bio has a platform that automates complex biological workflows, including drafting drug R&D plans, managing clinical and regulatory strategies, and discovering new drug candidates. That's all the detail that is available; it has not disclosed revenues or anything more on its products.
Last year, Anthropic announced that it was building tools for life sciences and that it had improved Claude's foundation model performance to support tasks in the sector. The announcement of the new business division was made in October last year came with a push to integrate its tools with a host of tech platforms.
Anthropic already partners companies that specialize in helping organizations adopt AI for life sciences work. These include the likes of Caylent, Deloitte, Accenture, KPMG, PwC, Quantium, Slalom, Tribe AI, and Turing. Its pharma clients include Sanofi, Novo Nordisk, Genmab, 10x Genomics, and Axiom Bio.
What's the AI landscape in pharma?
Anthropic's October announcement of a new life science division came months after Google announced its own range of models for biomedical research called TxGemma in March 2025.
The internet giant's models were announced to help researchers in therapeutics development which includes helping them evaluate proteins and compounds. In May last year, Google also announced MedGemma, a multimodal open-access model capable of understanding both medical images and clinical text.
From 2024 onwards, several US-based pharma companies had begun using OpenAI's ChatGPT including the likes of Moderna, Pfizer, and Johnson & Johnson. However, in these cases it was more for internal enterprise use.
Others such as Eli Lilly used ChatGPT for small and large molecule design, generating clinical trial documentation and regulatory submission drafts. AstraZeneca created AZ ChatGPT, an AI research assistant leveraging GPT models on AstraZeneca’s internal data to answer questions using proprietary biology/chemistry knowledge bases. Sanofi's CEO in 2024 in an interview with Fortune said that the company would collaborate with OpenAI to integrate generative AI in drug development.
How does Indian pharma view AI?
Consultancy McKinsey has predicted that generative AI could account for 2.6-4.5% of annual revenue across pharmaceutical and medical-product industries, amounting to $60 billion to $110 billion annually. That prediction was in 2023 and the potential would only have expanded now.
India's top pharma companies such as Sun Pharma, Glenmark and Biocon have actively started evaluating AI’s role in their operations and in R&D as they chase specialty molecules.
Biocon already uses models like Oracle, Microsoft Co-pilot and OpenAI for operational uses, as well as Alphafold for R&D. The company did not share details of its AI uses for drug development. However, it has been using generative AI models for procurement, to compare vendors and reduce input costs, making it more competitive, its chief technology officer Mandar Ghatnekar, told Mint.
Honchos such as Sun Pharma’s Dilip Shanghvi and Glenmark’s Glenn Saldanha believe AI can be leveraged to reduce time and cost in new drug development. In February, Shanghvi said that AI models could speed up phase three clinical trials.
What does the Anthropic deal mean to India's pharma companies?
The deal signals that Indian pharma needs to prepare for a world where AI-native drug discovery platforms, not just manufacturing scale, determine how competitive they will be in the future.
Companies will have to either look for M&A opportunities across the industry for startups or for companies that specifically tackle AI-led drug discovery. It's either that or increase their R&D spending in the area—which is easier said than done especially when it comes to acquiring talent.
To be sure, India has several deeptech startups in biotech and life sciences industries that have been working on solutions for specific diseases and ailments. Bengaluru-based Peptris Technologies has what it describes as India's first AI-discovered drug candidate, repurposed for Duchenne muscular dystrophy and licensed to Revio Therapeutics in March 2025. But that's just one example.
Other Indian companies in the space include Boltzmann Labs, which is building an AI-led R&D platform for drug discovery and immunitoAI which is using AI to design novel antibodies. What's yet unclear is whether these startups have matured into credible tuck-in acquisition targets.
Is AI-led drug discovery the next big thing?
Drug discovery being bolstered by AI isn't necessarily an emerging trend, but one that's seeing some growth after early proofs from a couple of years ago. Things really kicked off with Google Deepmind creating an AI program called AlphaFold, work on which started in the 2010s.
Deepmind trained the program on more than 170,000 proteins from the Protein Data Bank. In 2024, the research team's chief executive Demis Hassabis and director John Jumper won one half of the chemistry nobel prize for AlphaFold's ability to predict protein structures from their amino acid sequences.
This year has kicked off with a stream of AI platform deals across pharma. Companies such as Chai Discovery, Noetik, and Boltz have struck deals with Eli Lilly, GSK, and Pfizer, respectively, for access to their platforms.
Separately, Eli Lilly reached a $2.75 billion agreement with Hong Kong-based Insilico Medicine in late March to bring AI-developed drugs to global markets, according to a report from CNBC. The company said it has created at least 28 drugs using generative AI tools, with nearly half of them in the clinical testing phase.