Carterra, a leading provider of high-throughput surface plasmon resonance (HT-SPR) platforms for antibody and small molecule drug discovery, is highlighting 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 in August 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.
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 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.
