Carterra has highlighted the role of its high‑throughput surface plasmon resonance platforms in one of the largest wet‑lab validations of AI‑designed proteins reported to date. Anthropic used its Claude models to autonomously design protein binders against 15 targets, with no human input into any design decision.
Anthropic sent the designs to Twist Bioscience and Adaptyv Bio for analysis. Both organisations use Carterra HT‑SPR platforms to generate binding kinetics and affinity data at scale.
Protein design is a key step in early drug discovery. Anthropic generated functional binders in days rather than the weeks or months required by human specialists, shifting the bottleneck to experimental validation. Carterra said its technologies overcome this challenge by enabling large‑scale affinity and kinetics data to be produced in days instead of months.
“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.”
The ability to measure tens of thousands of binding interactions rapidly has changed the landscape of drug development. Carterra’s array‑based approach compresses complex experiments into a small number of unattended runs using as little as 1% of the sample required by traditional systems.
Collecting data on multiple targets and designs on a single array unlocks new scale. Anthropic compared Claude’s best RBX1 binder with a previous competition winner under identical conditions, measuring 3.9 nM versus 45 nM.
“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.”
A July 2026 Leerink Partners report named Carterra a core enabling technology in the growing Lab‑in‑the‑Loop market. The company’s platforms combine proprietary microfluidics with real‑time array HT‑SPR and are used widely for biologics and small molecule characterisation.
