Nextflow is the most widely adopted workflow engine in life sciences. Claude is the most capable AI for scientific reasoning. Together, it closes the loop on AI-assisted discovery and execution.
February 19, 2026A multi-omics drug discovery pipeline can involve sequencing data generation, quality control, variant calling across thousands of samples, gene expression analysis, protein structure prediction, pathway enrichment, and integration with clinical trial data for machine learning. Each step has dozens of configuration parameters, and scientists spend weeks developing and troubleshooting when workflows fail or produce unexpected results.
Nextflow, created by the founders of Seqera, is the solution to this complexity. It has become the dominant technology for bioinformatics and computational biology. Daily workflow runs have grown from ~20K in early 2024 to regularly exceeding 100K.
Anthropic recently launched the Nextflow Development Skill as part of the Claude for Life Sciences initiative. It enables bench scientists to run omics analyses without specialized bioinformatics training, but is currently limited to local execution of a subset of nf-core pipelines. The next step is agentic orchestration at enterprise scale, on any pipeline and with full traceability.
BioPipelineBench assesses AI's ability to execute bioinformatics workflows spanning targeted and long-read sequence analysis, metagenome assembly, and chromatin profiling. The rate of improvement signals practical viability.
Seqera is now rewriting the fundamental pipelines for biology. With Claude Opus 4.6, we developed RustQC, a quality control pipeline that was rebuilt from the ground up. We were able to achieve a remarkable 21x performance improvement.
Seqera is using AI agents to massively parallelize workflow optimizations.
By joining Seqera's expertise in Life Sciences with Anthropic's scientific reasoning, we can radically change the trajectory of human health.
"We can make 100 years of progress in areas like biology in five or ten years"— Dario Amodei