Anthropic has acquired biotech startup Coefficient Bio in a deal valued at around $400 million, reported The Information on Friday.
As part of the acquisition, the New York–based startup’s team will join Anthropic’s healthcare initiatives, signalling the AI company’s deeper push into life sciences and drug discovery.
Coefficient Bio, founded less than a year ago by AI researcher Nathan Frey, focuses on applying artificial intelligence to drug discovery and automating scientific experimentation.
Frey previously served as a principal scientist and group leader in the AI/ML team at Prescient Design, a research initiative backed by Roche subsidiary Genentech. Here, he worked on biological foundation models and AI-driven biomolecule design.
His other credentials include research roles alongside advisory positions at startups like Guide Labs and Atomscale.
While Coefficient Bio has maintained a relatively low public profile, Frey had recently posted on LinkedIn that the company was hiring, suggesting team expansion prior to acquisition.
Anthropic’s healthcare push
The acquisition aligns with Anthropic’s growing ambitions in healthcare and scientific research. The company, best known for its Claude family of AI models, has been steadily expanding use cases beyond general-purpose AI to domain-specific applications.
In early 2026, Anthropic introduced Claude for Healthcare, aimed at supporting workflows across research, clinical trials, and regulatory operations. More recently, it has been integrating Claude with a range of scientific platforms to extend its utility across the drug development lifecycle.
These integrations include partnerships with Medidata (clinical trial data), ClinicalTrials.gov (trial registry and planning), ToolUniverse (scientific tools), Open Targets (drug target identification), ChEMBL (bioactive compound data), and Owkin (AI pathology analysis), among others.
Source: Economic Times