Twist Bioscience and Adaptyv Bio used Carterra HT-SPR platforms to measure 1,320 protein binders against 15 targets designed by Anthropic’s Claude models
SALT LAKE CITY–(BUSINESS WIRE)–Carterra®, a leading provider of high-throughput surface plasmon resonance (HT-SPR) platforms for antibody and small molecule drug discovery, today highlighted the role of Carterra HT-SPR in one of the largest published wet-lab validations of AI-designed proteins to date.
In a study released August 18, 2026, Anthropic reported that its Claude models autonomously ran de novo protein binder design campaigns against 15 challenging targets — researching each target, selecting epitopes, running open-source design tools, and delivering ranked designs per target with no human input into any design decision. Anthropic sent the protein designs to Twist Bioscience and Adaptyv Bio to be analyzed. Both use Carterra HT-SPR platforms to generate binding kinetics and affinity data at scale.
Protein design is a key step in the early stages of a drug discovery campaign. Anthropic generated functional binders — with hit rates exceeding prior methods — in a matter of days rather than the weeks or months it would take a human specialist. This creates enormous opportunity for drug developers, but it also moves the bottleneck from protein design to wet lab experimental analysis. Carterra’s HT-SPR technologies overcome this bottleneck, enabling large scale affinity and kinetics binding data to be generated in days instead of the months required historically.
“This study shows the enormous potential of AI and Lab-in-a-Loop automation to accelerate drug discovery, when paired with high-throughput analysis platforms,” said Josh Eckman, CEO and co-founder of Carterra. “An AI system generated thousands of novel binders in a matter of days. Two independent labs experimentally validated the protein designs in a few weeks. Carterra was built for this moment, when measurement has to keep up with design.”
Scale Is the Story
The ability to measure tens of thousands of binding interactions in a short period of time has changed the specter of drug development. If done a few at a time on legacy SPR platforms, a campaign this size would consume many months of instrument time and far more purified antigen than a design program typically has on hand. Carterra’s array-based approach compresses these complex experiments into a small number of unattended runs which consume as little as 1% of the sample required by traditional systems.
Collecting data on multiple targets and multiple designs on a single Carterra array unlocks scale never before possible. When Anthropic wanted to know how Claude’s best RBX1 binder compared to the winner of an earlier open design competition, the investigators put both on the same array. Claude’s design measured 3.9 nM versus 45 nM for the previous winner, head-to-head, under identical conditions. And because human, mouse, and cynomolgus versions of a target were run in parallel, Anthropic got species cross-reactivity — a preclinical-relevance question it had treated as a secondary objective — as part of the primary dataset instead of requiring a follow-up study.
“The bottleneck in AI drug discovery is the experimental validation of all those molecules that the AI models come up with,” added Julian Englert, CEO and co-founder of Adaptyv Bio.“For large campaigns like this one, high-throughput SPR is the best method to get real binding kinetics data, which is why we’re using Carterra SPR in our automated lab. That’s what generates the data to train the AI models and improve the next round of designs.”
The Data Layer of AI-Driven Discovery
The study follows a July 2026 Leerink Partners report that named Carterra a core enabling technology in the roughly $7 billion “Lab-in-the-Loop” market for AI-driven antibody discovery, and identified binding affinity measurement as a central piece of the workflow.
Carterra’s platforms combine proprietary flow-printing microfluidics with real-time array HT-SPR, delivering up to 100 times the throughput of traditional label-free platforms while using a fraction of the sample. The company has spent more than two decades developing label-free biosensor technology, and its platforms are used by the world’s largest pharmaceutical companies for biologics and small molecule characterization.
About Carterra
Carterra® is a leading provider of innovative technologies designed to accelerate the discovery of novel therapeutic candidates. Carterra’s high-throughput LSA®, LSA-XT, Carterra Ultra®, and Carterra Vega™ platforms for monoclonal antibody and small molecule screening and characterization combine patented microfluidics technology with real-time high-throughput surface plasmon resonance (HT-SPR) and industry-leading analysis and software. For more information, visit www.carterra-bio.com.
About This Release
This press release references a research report published by Anthropic on August 18, 2026, a related case study published by Adaptyv Bio, and materials published by Twist Bioscience, together with third-party analyst research published by Leerink Partners. All experimental results described are as reported by their respective authors and reflect the views of those authors as of their publication dates. The protein binders described in the Anthropic study are research-stage molecules characterized for binding only; they have not been evaluated for therapeutic activity, and nothing in this release should be construed as a claim regarding any drug candidate. Carterra is a privately held company; nothing in this release should be construed as investment advice or as an offer to sell or a solicitation of an offer to buy any security. For research use only. Not for use in diagnostic procedures.
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Carterra, Inc.
Tel: (408) 594-9400
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