SandboxAQ Integrates Drug Discovery Models With Claude AI

SandboxAQ has integrated its large quantitative models into Anthropic's Claude AI system. The partnership allows users to access drug discovery and materials science tools through a conversational interface without specialized computing infrastructure.

The company develops physics-grounded models that run quantum chemistry calculations and simulate molecular dynamics. These models predict how candidate molecules are likely to behave before laboratory testing begins.

SandboxAQ was founded roughly five years ago as an Alphabet spinout. Eric Schmidt, Google's former CEO, serves as the company's chairman. The company has raised more than $950 million from investors and operates multiple business lines including cybersecurity.

SandboxAQ's customers include computational scientists, research scientists, and experimentalists at large pharmaceutical and industrial companies. These users search for new materials that can become marketable products.

SandboxAQ's models needed to provide their own digital infrastructure. The new integration places the models behind Claude's natural language interface. "For the first time, we have a frontier [quantitative] model on a frontier LLM that someone can access in natural language," Nadia Harhen, SandboxAQ's general manager of AI simulation, told TechCrunch.

"Our customers come to us because they've tried all the other software out there, and the complexity of their problem is such that it didn't work or didn't yield positive results for them when that translation went to take place in the real world," Harhen said.

The company stated that its models are trained on real-world lab data and scientific equations for use in biopharma, financial services, energy, and advanced materials sectors.