Novo will harness Anthropic’s AI assistant Claude to accelerate research and development (R&D) activities, as the drugmaker looks to regain its once-dominant position at the frontier of pharmaceutical innovation.
The collaboration between Novo and the tech giant will see the two jointly address key drug discovery challenges, develop solutions and workflows to support biological reasoning, and help accelerate the discovery and development of new medicines.
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Anthropic, one of the top AI companies alongside OpenAI, released Claude Science in June this year. The platform serves as a research workbench designed to help scientists streamline various tasks such as literature review, data analysis, and protein visualisation.
Novo said it will initially test Claude Science for specific workflows in R&D and address scientific problems where the collaboration would have the biggest impact. Novo will also use Anthropic’s frontier models to strengthen AI-driven software development to help scale the tech’s use across the company.
Novo’s CEO, Mike Doustdar, said: “Joining forces with Anthropic will supercharge our R&D organisation and help us on our mission to bring new, transformative health solutions to people living with chronic diseases.”
“AI can help us increase productivity in R&D and compress the path from research to marketed product. But beyond this, AI tools can also offer completely new scientific opportunities and aid reasoning and understanding of human biology and drug mechanics.”
The team-up comes just a few days after Novo announced a major rebrand. While still legally known as Novo Nordisk, the drugmaker will now be known solely as Novo in its day-to-day activities.
The rebrand is part of a wider strategy Novo is undertaking to turn its fortunes around. Once the most valuable company in Europe, share prices have fallen over recent years amid a loss of obesity and type 2 diabetes market share. While Novo initially dominated sales with semaglutide brands Ozempic and Wegovy, Lilly has sped into a dominant position. Lilly reported $23bn in revenue in Q2 on the back of strong sales for its T2D and obesity drugs; its 48% uptick far exceeded growth margins for Novo.
Under Doustdar, who joined as CEO just over a year ago, Novo has conducted more focused pipeline development efforts in search of new revenue generators. However, ambitions have been dogged by failure for heart and anti-inflammatory drug ziltivekimab, which analysts previously had high hopes for.
Pharma’s AI push continues
The Anthropic collaboration therefore signals Novo’s priority on its pipeline, and by turning to AI, it has joined a swathe of other big pharma companies to enlist the services of the technology to boost R&D.
Bristol Myers Squibb (BMS) is also working with Anthropic, while Merck has forged a multi-year partnership with Google Cloud. Eli Lilly has a close relationship with NVIDIA – the two doubled down on their partnership in January this year to establish an AI co-innovation lab. Their aim is for the building to provide a base in which Lilly’s biology and scientific experts will work alongside AI model builders and engineers from Nvidia.
Seeking to enter the fray, Amazon launched an AI application to design and test novel drugs more efficiently in April 2026.
However, Novo’s partnership comes in the same week that an ex-Anthropic researcher issued a warning about the runaway consequences of AI. In an interview with the BBC, the former employee said people working on the technology were frightened about the speed of its advancements and its potential impacts on humanity.
