Wall Street researchers just used Claude to design a drug. The experiment has spawned a new investment thesis.

By Joseph Adinolfi

The team at Citrini Research worked with Anthropic to see if motivated individuals with no lab experience could use AI to design a working drug

A team of Wall Street researchers put AI's capabilities to the test.

For years, artificial-intelligence evangelists have boasted about the technology's capacity to revolutionize drug development and medical research.

One team of independent investment researchers recently decided to put those claims to the test. Citrini Research, an independent research shop and investing newsletter founded by James Van Geelen, set out to see whether a team of motivated individuals with little to no lab experience could use Claude's frontier AI models to design novel drugs that work when put to the test.

After being stonewalled by automated model guardrails, the Citrini team reached out to Anthropic. They eventually received permission to carry out their experiment on-site at Anthropic's offices using an internal, unreleased Claude Science research model. After brainstorming suitable targets with Claude, the team settled on designing a synthetic protein that could serve as an antidote to scorpion venom.

Existing scorpion antivenoms are produced by injecting horses with venom and harvesting their plasma antibodies, making them expensive to produce, variable and effective only against specific species. More than 3,200 people die every year from scorpion stings globally, according to figures cited in the report.

The team set a moonshot goal: developing a single, universal protein "minibinder" that could neutralize five dominant scorpion neurotoxins across different species.

While the team ultimately failed to achieve that universal moonshot goal, the broader experiment still managed to produce 17 working proteins that successfully bound to four of the targeted individual toxins.

Those 17 proteins were among 211 candidate designs generated by Claude that were sent to real-world research laboratories for physical testing. The total budget for the experiment - including AI computing, tokens and wet-lab synthesis - was approximately $200,000, Citrini said. The team used Claude to help prepare a 35-page prompt that launched the design run. The initial computational design phase took just 64 hours and required only five messages to Claude.

The primary takeaway, according to Citrini, is that while AI-enabled research can dramatically compress the intellectual and design phase of drug development down to a few days, severe physical bottlenecks remain. Chief among them is the time required to physically synthesize and test newly designed proteins. It took 39 days for Citrini to obtain its first testing results from the contract research organizations it hired.

While AI can generate candidate molecules and assist in trial design, it cannot test drugs on non-human primates or accelerate the biological timeline required for human observation.

"For AI in biology, the bottleneck is primarily the experimental data and the speed at which life goes. We can't make a cell grow any faster, but we can do a bunch more experiments at once to generate more data," Van Geelen told MarketWatch on Tuesday via text. "We want to be long experiments, and whoever enables them to get faster, and produce better data.

Citrini's highest-conviction pick was Charles River Laboratories, which enables researchers to test a drug in cells, in mice and in monkeys - the last of which is "the biggest bottleneck in biotech," Citrini said.

Citrini also pitched Revvity and Tecan, two more life-sciences companies that help researchers carry out the experimental work needed to validate AI-designed drugs.

Anthropic published a detailed account of the experiment, as well as the full results and data from the more 200 candidate proteins, in a blog post. The company didn't respond to a request for comment by MarketWatch.

Citrini has developed a reputation for pushing the envelope in the world of investment research. During the early days of the bull market, Citrini established its reputation by correctly anticipating several popular investment themes, from AI to the advent of GLP-1s.

Since the start of the year, the organization has grown bolder. Shortly after the Iran war began, Citrini sent an analyst to the Strait of Hormuz to investigate in person the situation on the ground. Before that, a Citrini report envisioning a future where AI progress has led to widespread job losses was widely blamed for triggering a painful but short-lived selloff.

-Joseph Adinolfi

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10-20-26 1535ET