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Anthropic partners with Imperiato support research and explore how artificial intelligence (AI) could contribute to scientific discovery.

Anthropic’s gives Claude credits to researchers working on high-impact scientific projects to help them deepen and expand their work.

Anthropic have announced an expansion of the programme to 20 scientific foundations, institutions, and research groups worldwide, including º£½ÇÉçÇø.

As part of the partnership, Anthropic will provide token access to a range of research groups at º£½ÇÉçÇø. They will work particularly closely with º£½ÇÉçÇø’s Department of Life Sciences, providing additional tools and resources.

"Our Department of Life Sciences has set out a clear ambition for what AI can do for biological discovery, and this partnership with Anthropic gives that ambition further momentum." Professor Peter Haynes Provost of º£½ÇÉçÇø

, Head of the Department of Life Sciences, said: ‘There are an enormous array of problems across life sciences which AI can help us tackle - from climate change and the loss of biodiversity to the development of new treatments for fighting cancer, autoimmunity or anti-microbial resistance. Already now, one exciting project looks at new ways to tackle fungal pathogens.’

, Provost of º£½ÇÉçÇø, said: ‘Our Department of Life Sciences has set out a clear ambition for what AI can do for biological discovery, and this partnership with Anthropic gives that ambition further momentum. It complements º£½ÇÉçÇø's Centre for AI-Driven Innovation, which was established with funding from the UK government in partnership with the World Economic Forum to help accelerate the adoption of AI in the UK’s critical sectors, including life sciences.

AI will reshape a great deal about how science gets done, and Imperiahas the people, the facilities and the partnerships to help lead that change, working with the companies building these tools, not simply using them at a distance.’

Decoding and blocking fungal effectors with AI-designed protein binders

Fungal pathogens threaten both food security and human health, yet efforts to tackle them lag behind those addressing bacterial antimicrobial resistance. Through the new Anthropic partnership, Life Sciences researchers including , , and will combine AI to identify how fungi disable their hosts’ defences with AI-powered protein design to block these attacks.

The team has already developed a method that predicts, with around 90% accuracy, how a key class of fungal proteins that suppress host immunity interact with their hosts, while Anthropic’s Claude has demonstrated promising results in designing proteins to bind to other biological targets. The partnership will bring these capabilities together to design and test new proteins that target fungal pathogens, with the long-term aim of developing crops with built-in disease resistance and new approaches to tackling fungal infections in people.

Supporting fundamental discoveries in microbiology

, Associate Professor in Bacterial Pathogenesis in º£½ÇÉçÇø’s Department of Life Sciences, is already working with Anthropic to explore how its Claude models could support fundamental discoveries in microbiology.

His research group is investigating how AI could help researchers understand complex biological processes such as antimicrobial resistance spreading and uncover previously unknown molecular mechanisms.

As part of this collaboration, the team will test whether Claude can independently identify a previously unknown and unpublished biological mechanism of gene transfer recently discovered in their laboratory, using only the experimental evidence publicly available before the discovery was made.

The collaboration will also explore whether AI can approach complex biological problems without being constrained by the assumptions and conceptual frameworks that often guide human researchers.

Beyond reproducing existing discoveries, the team wants to understand whether AI can identify novel biological mechanisms that scientists might overlook, generate genuinely new scientific hypotheses and help design experiments to test them.

The work could ultimately help establish how AI can become a genuine scientific collaborator, complementing experimental research and accelerating discoveries in microbiology and beyond.

Dr da Costa said: ‘One of the most exciting opportunities for AI in science is its potential to challenge the way we think about biological problems. As scientists, we naturally approach questions based on our existing knowledge and assumptions, which can sometimes limit our ability to recognise unexpected mechanisms. Through our collaboration with Anthropic, we want to explore whether AI can help us overcome some of these biases, identify biological mechanisms that we might otherwise overlook, and generate new ideas that can be tested experimentally. The real promise of AI is not simply to make science faster, but to help us think differently and uncover biology that would otherwise remain hidden.’