# Claude for Life Sciences

Oct 20, 2025

Increasing the rate of scientific progress is a core part of Anthropic’s public benefit mission.

We are focused on building the tools to allow researchers to make new discoveries – and eventually, to allow AI models to make these discoveries autonomously.

Until recently, scientists typically used Claude for individual tasks, like writing code for statistical analysis or summarizing papers. Pharmaceutical companies and others in industry also use it for tasks across the rest of their business, like sales, to fund new research. Now, our goal is to make Claude capable of supporting the entire process, from early discovery through to translation and commercialization.

To do this, we’re rolling out [several improvements](https://www.claude.com/solutions/life-sciences) that aim to make Claude a better partner for those who work in the life sciences, including researchers, clinical coordinators, and regulatory affairs managers.

## Making Claude a better research partner

First, we’ve improved Claude’s underlying performance. Our most capable model, Claude Sonnet 4.5, is significantly better than previous models at a range of life sciences tasks. For example, on Protocol QA, a benchmark that tests the model’s understanding and facility with laboratory protocols, Sonnet 4.5 scores 0.83, against a human baseline of 0.79, and Sonnet 4’s performance of 0.74. Sonnet 4.5 shows a similar improvement on its predecessor on BixBench, an evaluation that measures its performance on bioinformatics tasks.

To make Claude more useful for scientific work, we’re now adding several [new connectors](https://claude.com/partners/mcp) to scientific platforms, the ability to use Agent Skills, and life sciences-specific support in the form of a prompt library and dedicated support.

## Connecting Claude to scientific tools

[**Connectors**](https://claude.ai/redirect/website.v1.2fb9770a-ad55-4434-8704-520f203231ac/settings/connectors) allow Claude to access other platforms and tools directly. We’re adding several new connectors that are designed to make it easier to use Claude for scientific discovery:

- **Benchling** gives Claude the ability to respond to scientists’ questions with links back to source experiments, notebooks, and records;
- **BioRender** connects Claude to its extensive library of vetted scientific figures, icons, and templates;
- **PubMed** provides access to millions of biomedical research articles and clinical studies;
- **Scholar Gateway developed by Wiley** provides access to authoritative, peer-reviewed scientific content within Claude to accelerate research discovery;
- **Synapse.org** allows scientists to share and analyze data together in public or private projects;
- **10x Genomics** allows researchers to conduct single cell and spatial analysis in natural language.

These connectors add to our existing set, which includes general purpose tools like Google Workspace and Microsoft SharePoint, OneDrive, Outlook, and Teams. Claude can also already work directly with Databricks to provide analytics for large-scale bioinformatics research, and Snowflake to search through large datasets using natural language questions.

## Developing skills for Claude

Last week, we released [Agent Skills:](https://www.anthropic.com/news/skills) folders including instructions, scripts, and resources that Claude can use to improve how it performs specific tasks. Skills are a natural fit for scientific work, since they allow Claude to consistently and predictably follow specific protocols and procedures.

We’re developing a number of scientific skills for Claude, beginning with **`single-cell-rna-qc`** This skill performs quality control and filtering on single-cell RNA sequencing data, using [scverse](https://scverse.org/) best practices:

_CLAUDE PERFORMS QUALITY CONTROL ON SINGLE-CELL RNA-SEQ DATA._

In addition to the skills we’re creating, scientists can build their own. For more information and guidance, including setting up custom skills, see [here](https://support.claude.com/en/articles/12512180-using-skills-in-claude).

## Using Claude for Life Sciences

Claude can be used for life sciences tasks like the following:

- **Research, like literature reviews and developing hypotheses:** Claude can cite and summarize biomedical literature and generate testable ideas based on what it finds.
- **Generating protocols**: With the Benchling connector, Claude can draft study protocols, standard operating procedures and consent documents.
- **Bioinformatics and data analysis**: Process and analyze genomic data with Claude Code. Claude can present its results in [slides, docs](https://www.anthropic.com/news/create-files), or code notebook format.
- **Clinical and regulatory compliance**: Claude can draft and review regulatory submissions, and compile compliance data.

In addition, to help scientists get started quickly, we’re creating a [library of prompts](https://support.claude.com/en/articles/12614768-getting-started-with-claude-for-life-sciences) that should elicit best results on tasks like the above.

## Supporting the life sciences

In addition to the updates described above, we’re supporting life sciences research through our [AI for Science](https://www.anthropic.com/news/ai-for-science-program) program. This program provides free API credits to support leading researchers working on high-impact scientific projects around the world.

Our partnerships with these labs helps us identify new applications for Claude, while helping scientists answer some of their most pressing questions. We continue to welcome [submissions](https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSfwDGfVg2lHJ0cc0oF_ilEnjvr_r4_paYi7VLlr5cLNXASdvA/viewform) for project ideas.