🤖A year ago, Anthropic’s life sciences plans were basically just a blog post by its CEO. In recent months, the company has been on a sprint to enter the industry. Endpoints Senior Biopharma Correspondent Andrew Dunn details Anthropic's 100-day blitz, including its acquisition of a stealth-stage biotech and hiring of scientific stars like Nobel laureate John Jumper. It’s also selling a bioscience-tailored version of its flagship large language model, Claude, and building its own biology research team. 

Anthropic has kept a degree of secrecy about its attention-grabbing announcements. It’s clear that Anthropic aspires to be a key player in the life sciences, among the likes of interested tech giants like Nvidia, Google, Microsoft and OpenAI. But some in the drug industry aren’t convinced that Anthropic can be trusted, particularly as it balances the line between service provider and potentially something more, Andrew writes. There’s been much speculation about whether Anthropic will eventually bring a pipeline into human testing, whether more acquisitions are on the horizon, and whether the company’s plans to dabble in drug development mark the start of something bigger. 

Some clues about Anthropic’s biology plans can be found in its open job postings. One role is for an early-career scientist in a “full hands-on bench role” that does not involve developing AI/ML models. Another operations role is to run the back end of a laboratory: procurement, inventory, safety, equipment and space. Outside the lab, Anthropic is hiring a partnership manager for the life sciences to lead strategic relationships that combine Claude with “biotech company formation and R&D.” Check out Andrew’s full analysis here.

🇨🇳Like many of the biggest pharma companies lately, Novartis is signing lots of deals with biotechs from China. On this week’s earnings call, CEO Vas Narasimhan said his company’s moves don’t represent a shift of strategy. Rather, Novartis is “agnostic” to the geography of a deal and “will go wherever the science takes us.” It’s one of the clearest endorsements yet from a major Western pharma company about the rise of China-based life science startups.
 

Novartis’ deals for China assets have spanned a broad range of therapeutic areas. The company licensed an anti-amyloid antibody from SciNeuro in mid-January for $165 million upfront. The next day, it spent $50 million upfront on a radiopharmaceutical cancer drug from Zonsen PepLib Biotech. Novartis also went to China in 2025 to tap a brain delivery platform from Sironax and to expand an siRNA deal with Argo Biopharma that it signed the previous year. Read more from Ayisha Sharma here.

As the FDA makes way for a new commissioner, acting leadership seems to be walking back some of the moves made by former Commissioner Marty Makary, Max Bayer writes. “A lot is not necessarily policy reversals, but just getting back to predictable ways of doing business, and that seems to be the north star of where everyone’s coming from right now,” said Lowell Schiller, a former senior FDA official during Trump’s first term and a nonresident senior scholar at the USC Schaeffer Institute.

Since taking over, Acting Commissioner Kyle Diamantas convened rare disease advocacy groups early last month and pledged that political interference wouldn’t get in the way of product reviews. Some biotech and pharma companies announced that the agency had reconsidered prior guidance. And in a recent letter from Diamantas to Rep. Diana DeGette (D-CO), Diamantas said some journal articles authored by Makary and his deputies didn’t reflect FDA regulations or policies. HHS spokesperson Emily Hilliard said “any suggestion that the FDA reconsidered products based on changes in leadership is false.” 

The White House is still weighing its options for a new permanent leader, and Max writes that officials plan to name permanent CBER and CDER heads alongside the pick. You can read more here.

🖥️Anthropic wasn’t the only company to make life sciences-related AI news this week. David Younger’s startup, A-Alpha Bio, launched an AI antibody data consortium with GSK, Boltz and others, selling subscriptions in exchange for access to the massive amounts of data it aims to generate. 

Meanwhile, Bristol Myers teamed up with Nvidia to build “the most advanced and energy-efficient AI” supercomputer system in the biopharma industry. BMS will be the first pharma company to use Nvidia’s newest line of computing chips, called Vera Rubin. Financial details of the deal weren’t disclosed, and Nvidia expects to ship these units in the fourth quarter. 

Roche also outlined some of its AI thoughts during its earnings call this week. AI has already contributed to “a significant increase in new molecules” in its pipeline, CEO Thomas Schinecker said Thursday. However, Roche is not spending “a very significant amount” on token use, CFO Alan Hippe said.

📊It’s no secret that sales of Leqembi have been disappointing. Biogen expected the Alzheimer’s treatment to provide near-term revenue while other experimental drugs made their way through the lengthy process of clinical trials. But that bridge never materialized. The company acquired Apellis earlier this year, and analysts now describe it as a move to shore up those sales numbers before a number of pipeline programs read out in the next couple years, Max Gelman reports. 

Apellis and its rare disease drug Empaveli are now expected to fill that Leqembi-sized hole in Biogen’s short-term revenue. The deal left some investors with disappointment that Biogen probably won’t pull off another, more exciting acquisition, and some are questioning the price point. Read more from Max here. Biogen reports its second-quarter earnings next week.