On Oct. 27, 2026, Anthropic announced the acquisition of Mithril Medicine, a one-person company that has been developing treatments for two rare forms of muscular dystrophy.

Its founder, Cody Tranbarger, used Claude to organize contracts, logistics, and experiments with 11 external labs, and delegated many other aspects of Mithril’s operations to Claude. As a result, Mithril took a possible treatment for one form of muscular dystrophy from an idea to promising results in mice in less than 18 months.

Now at Anthropic, Cody is continuing this research, and plans to start several new programs. If his drug candidates continue to hold up, they expect a drug to be ready to start clinical trials in humans as soon as late 2028.

Mithril Medicine is developing treatments for two rare and particularly aggressive forms of muscular dystrophy: LAMA2-related congenital muscular dystrophy and α-dystroglycanopathy.

Before it was acquired by Anthropic in July, Mithril had only one full-time employee: Tranbarger its founder. The rest of the work was done by part-time consultants and third-party labs. But Cody found that the team’s progress was often held back by the logistical burdens of scientific research, including coordinating vendors, analyzing data, and planning next steps. He began using Claude extensively to ease those bottlenecks.

By offloading much of the company’s operational tasks to Claude, Mithril was able to develop a proof-of-principle for an antibody treatment targeting LAMA2-CMD in less than 18 months. In their short-term study, mice with a severe form of the disease that received the antibody therapy had roughly twice the grip strength and tricep force of untreated mice, and more of them survived to the end of the study.

Mithril’s work on these two diseases became Anthropic’s first in-house drug development programs. It’s also been Anthropic’s first experiment with this “Pipeline-in-a-Person” research model, in which one scientist works with Claude to pursue several biological hypotheses at the same time. Cody still runs both of Mithril’s original research programs, and is preparing to start several more. Beyond Mithril, turning the first idea for a new drug program into a detailed thesis, design plan and experimental strategy took two to three days. Cody estimates that, without Claude, it would have taken him one to two months.