In recent months, Anthropic has been building more and more ties with the biopharma industry, including partnerships with Big Pharma companies such as Sanofi, Novo Nordisk and AbbVie.
AI frontrunner Anthropic has appointed Novartis CEO Vas Narasimhan to its board of directors, further cementing a central role for advanced machine learning models in drug development.
As part of Anthropic’s board, Narasimhan will help ensure that the company “responsibly balances” its mission of advancing AI for the benefit of humanity and its obligation to deliver value to shareholders, Neil Shah, chair of Anthropic’s Long-Term Benefit Trust, said in a prepared statement on Tuesday. The Trust, which selected Narasimhan, operates independently of Anthropic and is populated by members with no financial stake in the company.
In his own statement, Narasimhan also pointed to the AI outfit’s public benefit mission.
“Anthropic is setting the standard for how AI should be developed to benefit humanity,” he said in a statement, adding that for the healthcare and life sciences sectors, AI is helping to improve understanding of disease biology and aid drug design, in turn “accelerating solutions to some of the hardest scientific challenges.”
In recent months, Anthropic has made a clear turn toward healthcare, putting more and more money into tailoring its models to fit the needs of the life sciences industry. In October 2025, for example, the company rolled out Claude Life Sciences, a version of its AI model geared specifically toward biopharma professionals, including clinical trial coordinators, regulatory managers and researchers.
Novartis’ Big Pharma peers, including Sanofi, Novo Nordisk and AbbVie, have bought into Anthropic’s services, and the company has also built ties with other smaller biopharma players, including Genmab and 10X Genomics.
Earlier this month, Anthropic again made waves across biopharma when it acquired the little-known New York startup Coefficient Bio for $400 million. Not much is known about Coefficient and its platform, but its co-founders Nathan Frey and Samuel Stanton were previously involved with machine learning research at Roche’s Genentech.
Biopharma’s AI shift goes beyond Anthropic, however. Experts believe that advanced machine learning models have played a role in the rebound of initial public offerings this year. AI is not only helping investors better understand the risk calculus in biotech, but has also given biotechs a way to present their case transparently to potential backers, according to Tyrone Lam, chief business officer at GATC Health, an AI-forward tech-bio company.
“The companies drawing the most serious investor attention right now, regardless if they’ve IPO’d, share a common characteristic: they’re using AI not just as a discovery accelerator, but as a risk communication tool,” Lam told BioSpace in an email.
