Anthropic Launches Rare Disease Research Grants Program with AI for Science Initiative

Anthropic has announced the launch of its rare disease research grants program, a new initiative within its AI for Science program. The goal is to accelerate scientific research and discovery in this area by providing access to Anthropic’s API and Claude credits. This program aims to build a community of researchers working together to understand how AI can reshape our understanding of rare diseases.

The AI for Science program was launched last spring, with the aim of supporting high-impact projects across various fields, including drug repurposing and quantum simulation. Since its inception, Anthropic has found that projects are more generative when multiple grantees work on related questions and exchange tips. To build upon this success, the company is now launching thematic calls for projects within the broader AI for Science program.

The rare disease research grants program will support two tracks: one for scientists doing basic research and another for early-stage biotechs working to accelerate drug development for rare diseases. The first track aims to foster collaboration between clinical researchers, patient organizations, and data scientists to increase the pace of progress in basic science and discovery of mechanisms underlying rare diseases.

The Monarch Initiative is an international consortium that has partnered with Anthropic on this effort. This organization works to improve diagnosis and mechanism discovery for patients with rare diseases by developing standards and resources such as the Mondo Disease Ontology, a computational framework and coding system that reconciles disease definitions scattered across OMIM, Orphanet, ICD, and dozens of other sources.

The Monarch Knowledge Graph is another resource developed by this consortium. It integrates genotype-phenotype data across species to aid diagnostics and mechanism discovery. Most recently, contributors have been stitching data and knowledge together in a new agent-friendly mechanistic disease classification library called DisMech, where Claude can read case reports, variant databases, registry schemas, raw public data, and more.

Claude can already make a significant impact on the interoperability of rare disease data and knowledge. However, there’s still much work to be done to gather better and more data, improve diagnostic infrastructure, and promote patient-led approaches across the rare disease ecosystem. Anthropic will continue to partner with Monarch and others to approach this problem from angles where AI is less obviously applicable.

The second track of the program supports biotechnologists and early-stage biotechs working on speeding up clinical development for rare diseases. This process typically takes one to two years, with much time spent waiting in queues for certified manufacturing slots, running safety studies sequentially instead of in parallel, and hand-assembling thousands of pages of chemistry and regulatory documentation required for in-patient testing.

Anthropic believes that AI can help compress phases of this process by making it easier to complete documentation. This includes drafting and reviewing the regulatory dossier, as well as speeding up therapeutic strategy selection. Claude’s capabilities also include analyzing whether a target is druggable across a suite of modalities such as small molecules, antibodies, genetic medicines, and so on.

Anthropic has existing partnerships with organizations working in rare disease therapeutics, including Every Cure, the Centre for Population Genomics, and the Violet Research Institute. These partners are using Claude to identify drug repurposing opportunities, draft variant classifications, navigate FDA guidelines, run bioinformatics pipelines, analyze experimental data, and more.

The program will be accepting applications through August 2, 2026 at 11:59 PM PST. Accepted applicants can use their credits to access Claude Opus or other generally available models approved for use in biology. Projects that may run up against Anthropic’s bio classifiers may be eligible for exemptions.

Examples of track one projects include proposing and ranking mechanistic links between distinct rare diseases, curating and summarizing patient organization data, building evaluations that measure how well models handle rare disease tasks, and more. Outputs from this track will be made publicly available at Monarchinitiative.org.

The program ties directly into Anthropic’s mission to extend the benefits of AI to areas that might not emerge naturally through market forces. However, it acknowledges that rare disease is a complex problem requiring collaboration between multiple organizations and approaches. The initiative also recognizes AI’s limitations in this space, including its inability to address challenges like insurance authorization or access to diagnostic facilities and infrastructure.

Anthropic hopes the program will be complemented by efforts from other organizations and research institutions to generate more high-quality, longitudinal data as well as encourage robust public-private partnerships.