Scorpion envenomation is a neglected tropical disease that kills more than 3,250 people a year, and the antivenoms used against it are animal-derived. Anthropic ran a design campaign against it in which Claude worked with considerable autonomy for 64 hours, from one initial prompt and four follow-up directives, choosing its own quality thresholds and tools along the way.

Claude used 12 design tools to generate 318,484 candidate proteins and screened 553,052 design-toxin pairs, about 10,000 GPU hours in all, before narrowing the set to the 211 single-domain designs tested here. Of those, 60 target an individual toxin, 30 the beta-family toxins, 30 the alpha-family toxins, and 91 all five toxins at once.

The five neurotoxins come from four scorpion species: Cn2 (Mexico), Ts1 (Brazil), AaH I and AaH II (North Africa) and LqhIII (the Middle East).

What this collection holds

679 design-toxin measurements from Adaptyv Bio's five affinity experiments, one for each design against each toxin it was tested on. Every measurement carries its per-replicate KD, k_on and k_off from surface plasmon resonance with 95% confidence intervals, the binding model and fit quality, along with binding calls, binding strength and expression.

Each design also has computational metrics: an ESMFold2 monomer structure with its domain and novelty analysis, and a Boltz-2 prediction of the complex with the toxin it was designed against.