Apply for Anthropic’s AI for Science rare disease research grants \ Anthropic<br>Try Claude

Announcements<br>Apply for Anthropic’s AI for Science rare disease research grants<br>Jul 16, 2026

Last spring, we announced Anthropic’s AI for Science program, an initiative designed to accelerate scientific research and discovery through access to our API. Since launching, we have supported researchers working on a variety of high-impact projects, ranging from drug repurposing to quantum simulation. Throughout this initiative, we have found that projects are more generative when multiple AI for Science grantees are working on related questions and exchanging tips. So we now plan to launch thematic calls for projects within the broader AI for Science program.<br>Today, we are sharing a focused call for applications centered specifically on rare genetic diseases. Accepted applicants will receive up to $50,000 in Claude credits over six months, with the goal of building a community of researchers looking into how AI can reshape our understanding of rare disease. This program has two tracks: one for scientists doing basic research, and another for early-stage biotechs working on speeding up clinical development for rare diseases.<br>Rare disease research is an area where knowledge of fundamental science is limited. In aggregate, rare diseases are among the most prevalent conditions on the planet (an estimated 400 million people live with one of more than 7,000 rare diseases).1 But these conditions are scattered across small populations, making it challenging for clinicians to build patient registries, identify promising therapeutic targets, and design clinical trials. Moreover, rare diseases are typically characterized by their unique features (such as a specific genetic variation or combination of symptoms) that are often studied in isolation, making it nearly impossible to spot mechanisms shared across diseases. Finally, rare diseases face a challenge endemic to all drug development: the time it takes to move promising drug candidates into patient trials.<br>We think AI can help with these and related challenges. AI makes it possible to accurately model rare genetic diseases and detect patterns across them. It also helps researchers synthesize findings across a large corpus of literature, quickly extract information from limited datasets, and create shared terminology, all of which informs how researchers can better use the information they do have, even as more work is done to generate more data and address challenges pertaining to access and geography. To explore where AI can be most helpful, we’ve made rare diseases the focus of our current call for AI for Science projects.<br>Track one: Scaling our basic science partnerships<br>The first track of our rare disease research grants program aims to foster collaboration between clinical researchers, patient organizations, and data scientists to increase the pace of progress in basic science and the discovery of the mechanisms underlying rare diseases.<br>An early partner in this effort is the Monarch Initiative, an international consortium working to improve diagnosis and mechanism discovery for patients with rare diseases. Monarch develops standards and resources such as the Mondo Disease Ontology, a computational framework and coding system that reconciles disease definitions scattered across OMIM, Orphanet, ICD, and dozens of other sources; as well as the Monarch Knowledge Graph, which integrates genotype-phenotype data across species to aid diagnostics and mechanism discovery.<br>Most recently, Monarch contributors have been stitching data and knowledge together in a new agent-friendly mechanistic disease classification library called DisMech, where Claude can read case reports, variant databases, registry schemas, raw public data, and more, and point out mechanistic similarities between diseases at an unmatched pace and scale. Monarch is inviting our AI for Science grantees to use and contribute to its resources, such as Mondo and DisMech, to reveal new mechanistic hypotheses that will support developing treatments.<br>Monarch’s work on improving the interoperability of rare disease data and knowledge is a place where Claude can already have a major impact. However, there’s more work to be done to gather better and more data, improve diagnostic infrastructure, and promote patient-led approaches across the rare disease ecosystem, and make the information accessible to agentic science. We will continue to partner with Monarch and others to approach this problem from the angles where AI is less obviously applicable, and we’ll share what we learn as we do.<br>Track two: Scaling our biotech partnerships<br>The second track of our rare disease research grants program will support biotechnologists and early-stage biotechs working to accelerate drug development for rare diseases. Today, it takes one to two years to move from a confirmed genetic diagnosis to a treatment available to patients, with much of...