Surprise 1: Anthropic acquired a one-person biotech . . . Surprise 2: that person is me Surprise 3: I’m here to tell you all about it Yes, this is what you think it is; after 6 yrs of increasingly loose anonymity: the Professor Oak reveal post …and yes, it has gotten so boring around here that I’m literally doxxing myself to spice up the timeline ------- Ok, allow me to introduce myself. My name is Cody Tranbarger. I mostly tweet, but occasionally find time to dabble in drug dev & starting/building biotechs. My past lives span the VC, crossover, startup continuum; Prof Oak has been my way of keeping a digital foot in those worlds, despite having my physical feet planted elsewhere. The past 18 mo, ‘elsewhere’ was Mithril Medicine, a co. I founded to develop bsAbs for LAMA2-CMD & other ECM-related genetic diseases. Mithril was born out of hands-on building with @MikeNGladstone, @JasonPaulRhodes, @LifeSciVC, & team @atlasventure. Somehow, I made enough half-decent calls along the way (even a broken clock is right twice a day, eh?) to convince them Mithril/I warranted a small seed. While I can hardly rationalize such an outrageously cavalier bet, I’m grateful for it, & I'd partner with Atlas again in a heartbeat. In typical AV fashion, Mithril’s primordial form was virtual, decentralized, & ultra-lean. This stage tends to be short-lived, but for Mithril, it worked surprisingly well, for surprisingly long, thanks in part to the rapid maturation of the AI tools I used liberally. Eventually, Mithril became a bit of an experiment itself - to find the upper bound of how far it could scale as a single operator + a bunch of Claude (+ a stellar bench of part-time consultants). In parallel, I started spending time with @nc_frey, @an1lam, & @CoefficientBio team; and promptly experienced, for the 1st time, AI at the frontier. Soon thereafter, Mithril stopped looking like an experiment, & started looking like a preview of an entirely new operating model. From that spark came “Pipeline-in-a-Person.” The idea immediately resonated when we shared it here back in April; and it was central to the shared vision that led to Anthropic’s acquisition of Mithril, & my joining the team. Why join Anthropic? Three reasons. (1) For Mithril, the programs continue, with more resources & infrastructure behind them, and as much Claude as I can put to work. (2) For me, the chance to start several more programs, & find out how many one person can actually run in parallel - an almost unprecedented luxury for a curious drug hunter. (3) For our mission, a path to institutionalize & scale this new way of working, then put it in the hands of all of biopharma, all over the world - which, candidly, I find the most energizing. Will AI x Bio cure diseases? Unequivocally yes, imo… but not by the route that gets the most airtime. Rather than timeline acceleration & compression, I see orchestration & parallelization as today's low-hanging fruit. Most drug hunters see a handful of go/no-go calls in a career, & spend entirely too much of the rest trading emails (my inbox can attest). Give them the bandwidth to run several programs at once, and the time to focus on scientific judgment, and I’m willing to bet they’ll make better calls. And at scale, better calls translate to more drugs, higher hit rates, broader patient impact, & likely, a disease or 10 or 100 cured. I couldn't be more excited to build toward that future @AnthropicAI. Finally, a heartfelt thank you to BioTwitter/X. The end of anonymity is bittersweet, but if anyone’s earned a proper introduction, you all have. It’s difficult to overstate how much this app has done for me: a decade of education, plenty of friends, many job opportunities, several mentors, a few investors, even a co-founder (fmr). It was the generosity of this community that inspired me to start posting 6 years ago, after just as many years lurking. I hope I’ve been able to pay it forward, in my own small way. But, to be clear, Prof Oak isn’t going anywhere. Same beat, same themes, and now, a front-row seat to drug development at the frontier. Stay tuned for dispatches from the trenches; and remember... Gotta Cure 'Em All

Over the past few months, Anthropic scientists have engaged in deep research partnerships with six organizations developing new medicines. We've also begun drug discovery efforts of our own. In doing so, we’ve learned much more about how Claude can support the many stages of drug development. In this blog post, we share some early results from these efforts, and describe how this work fits in with our wider ambitions in the life sciences. anthropic.com/research/early…

Our last challenge in the Anthropic x Adaptyv Protein Design Competition is about immunotherapy, one of the most important ways of treating cancer. Immunotherapy helps the immune system attack cancer cells, but distinguishing them from healthy cells isn't always easy. In some cancers, the difference can be as subtle as a single amino acid in a small protein fragment. That's the case with KRAS, a protein that works like a growth switch in our cells. In many cancers, a mutation leaves the switch stuck on, and the cell keeps multiplying itself and grows into a tumor. In Challenge 5, you need to design a binder that sticks to the mutated piece of KRAS, but not to the healthy version, so that the immune system can find and attack the cancer cells. The deadline to submit protein designs for this challenge is November 8. Then, we'll pick the best designs and test them in our lab.

Acting @FDA Commissioner Kyle Diamantas, @FDA_KyleD, sat down for a fireside chat with #NORD President and CEO Pam Gavin to kick off the 2026 #NORDSummit, where he shared that the #FDA is committed to modernizing its review process and is relying on #RareDisease patient voices to help shape its fit-for-purpose regulatory framework. We appreciated the opportunity to break down what that will entail, and we're excited to be a partner in this crucial, timely mission.

New research led by @DanielPetrylak shows that #Bavdegalutamide, a novel #PROTAC cancer drug developed from research led by @CraigMCrews, may benefit patients with #mCRPC whose tumors harbor AR T878/H875 mutations, underscoring the importance of genomic testing to guide targeted treatment. medicine.yale.edu/cancer/pub… @SmilowCancer @Yale_Urology @JCO_ASCO

With our partners at @Merck, we announced detailed results from the Phase 3 INTerpath-001 trial evaluating intismeran autogene (mRNA-4157 or V940), an investigational individualized neoantigen therapy, in combination with pembrolizumab, in patients with completely resected stage IIB-IV melanoma. Presented during a Presidential Symposium at the European Society for Medical Oncology (ESMO) Congress 2026, these findings offer important insights into the potential of individualized cancer treatment. Read more: modernatx.com/recapping-the-…

With our partners at @Merck, we announced detailed results from the Phase 3 INTerpath-001 trial evaluating intismeran autogene (mRNA-4157 or V940), an investigational individualized neoantigen therapy, in combination with pembrolizumab, in patients with completely resected stage IIB-IV melanoma. Presented during a Presidential Symposium at the European Society for Medical Oncology (ESMO) Congress 2026, these findings offer important insights into the potential of individualized cancer treatment. Read more: modernatx.com/recapping-the-…

The FDA is launching the Rare Disease Framework Initiative, giving patients a greater voice and providing drug developers with more regulatory clarity. "They're going to actually change policies that reviewers follow," says @ScottGottliebMD. cnb.cx/3VW0YTE

People who cured / are curing their own cancer on X: 1/ @sytses - bone cancer, billionaire founder of Gitlab, developed 10+ personalized therapies for himself. 2/ @paul_conyngham - shrank his dog Rosie's mast cell cancer tumors after chemo and surgery weren't enough. Now backed by YC and Founders Fund 3/ @miriamgonp - stage 4 breast cancer, tumor sequenced, searching for vaccine manufacturer now 4/ @kevinace - stage 4 lung cancer, angel investor in 300+ companies, first drug stopped working after 18 months. Vaccine designed, now paying $300k out of pocket for the vaccine 5/ @masonbgrant: going founder mode on his his 32-year-old wife's rare liver cancer, sequencing her tumor with AI agents 6/ @ArunRLverma: former product leader at Atoms and Shopify, brain tumor, built a vaccine from his tumor. Now building an AI health agent startup based on what he went through We're going to make it

People who cured / are curing their own cancer on X: 1/ @sytses - bone cancer, billionaire founder of Gitlab, developed 10+ personalized therapies for himself. 2/ @paul_conyngham - shrank his dog Rosie's mast cell cancer tumors after chemo and surgery weren't enough. Now backed by YC and Founders Fund 3/ @miriamgonp - stage 4 breast cancer, tumor sequenced, searching for vaccine manufacturer now 4/ @kevinace - stage 4 lung cancer, angel investor in 300+ companies, first drug stopped working after 18 months. Vaccine designed, now paying $300k out of pocket for the vaccine 5/ @masonbgrant: going founder mode on his his 32-year-old wife's rare liver cancer, sequencing her tumor with AI agents 6/ @ArunRLverma: former product leader at Atoms and Shopify, brain tumor, built a vaccine from his tumor. Now building an AI health agent startup based on what he went through We're going to make it

Cancer patients with the same diagnosis often have very different tumor biology. Molecular testing can reveal underlying differences, but that's slow and expensive. Introducing Holon-S1, our platform to predict genes and biomarkers from routine pathology slides. • beats two other models at predicting spatial gene activity in a controlled comparison • has identified potentially novel biomarkers in breast cancer and colon cancer • evaluated across 16 organ types and more than 15 scanners, using slides from both formalin-fixed, paraffin-embedded and fresh-frozen tissue. We believe Holon-S1 has the potential to help researchers find new biomarkers in slides they already have, discover treatment targets, and bring more personalized cancer care within reach!