Citrini Research is backing life sciences stocks after using Claude to design proteins

Citrini Research is backing life sciences stocks after using Anthropic's Claude to design proteins aimed at scorpion toxins, the firm said as it published a report on the project on Tuesday.

Charles River Laboratories, Revvity and Tecan Group are among Citrini's top stock picks. Citrini analysts argued Tuesday that growing use of AI "virtual biologists" should lift demand for "any company that sends them their first real-world invoice," according to Bloomberg. The firm called Revvity "the compute of biotech," according to Bloomberg.

Citrini said it began looking outside AI infrastructure in early June and settled on life sciences and healthcare. The firm said the sector had been "a graveyard for returns" over the past five years and described it as "a secular story at cyclical lows."

The team worked for three months with an internal Anthropic research model that is more advanced than the publicly released version, Citrini said. Prompting took place at Anthropic's offices because Citrini's request to bypass a biosecurity classifier required security measures it did not have. The firm budgeted $200,000 for the project.

In August, Citrini gave Claude a roughly 35-page prompt. Claude spawned more than 300 sub-agents to design the proteins, the firm said. The initial campaign produced 180 designs. Four follow-up prompts grew the pool to 211, which Citrini sent to Twist Bioscience and Adaptyv Bio for synthesis and testing.

Seventeen designs bound to their targets across four of the five toxins, Citrini said. Two designs, Cn2-B1 and Cn2-B2, bound with affinities in the low-nanomolar range. An attempt to design one molecule that binds all five toxins failed.

Citrini said no experiment has tested whether the proteins stop the toxins from working. "A great deal of science remains before anyone could call the result a treatment," the firm wrote. Anthropic has published a technical blog post and data release on the results, according to Citrini.

Anthropic unveiled Claude Science in July, a workbench that connects to more than 60 scientific databases and uses a primary agent that can spawn specialized sub-agents. It runs on existing Claude models, including Opus 4.8, and Anthropic also started an internal drug discovery program.

Novo Nordisk and Anthropic announced a collaboration in September on drug discovery problems identified by Novo's scientists. Novo will test Claude Science for specific research and development workflows.