WHO and Partners Deployed Claude AI for Virus Genome Assembly, Reporting, and Outbreak Modeling During One of the Largest Ebola Outbreaks in History
WHO and Partners Deployed Claude AI for Virus Genome Assembly, Reporting, and Outbreak Modeling During One of the Largest Ebola Outbreaks in History
Since May, the Democratic Republic of the Congo has been experiencing an outbreak of the rare and lethal Bundibugyo strain of Ebola, for which no vaccine currently exists. An Anthropic case study published on September 23 describes how Claude is assisting the WHO's African regional office (WHO AFRO), the vaccine coalition CEPI, and the Congolese National Institute of Biomedical Research (INRB).
Rural health workers go door to door in the outbreak zone; their notebook is often the only complete record of when a person fell ill and whom they had contact with. The sooner a case is found, the higher the chance of survival. But the data travels a long path: clinics relay cases to districts via WhatsApp, districts enter the numbers into PowerPoint slides, and the provincial health ministry compiles them into a report. This process used to consume an entire day.
"I have been fighting this virus for fifty years. The tools have changed completely, but the rule has not: to defeat Ebola, you need to know where it is today, not where it was last week," says Jean-Jacques Muyembe-Tamfum, director general of INRB. In 1976, he was among the first to describe Ebola in Yambuku, Congo, and in 2016 he led the development of mAb114, one of the first effective treatments against the disease.
Tendai Musa, a WHO AFRO staff member, trained Claude on the required procedure himself, simply by describing it in plain language, with no programmers involved. Claude now extracts and cross-checks the numbers from district slides against the previous report, producing a summary in an hour instead of a day. Using the same tool, WHO AFRO analysts run outbreak scenarios. "Before, we could not even begin to think about which outbreak model might work better. We only had time to run a single one," says Paul Ouma, Musa's colleague. Analysts now evaluate several scenarios at once, and the results influence where treatment centers are deployed.
There is no approved vaccine against Bundibugyo. Ervebo, a vaccine targeting the Zaire strain, exists, and early data suggest it may offer partial protection against Bundibugyo as well. CEPI is testing this hypothesis with the help of Claude. "Claude does not decide which serum samples to analyze in order to obtain cross-reactivity data for Ervebo against Bundibugyo. That remains a scientific decision made by experts," says Pauline Brangel of CEPI. Claude's role is limited to consolidating experimental data into a comparable format so that experts can reach decisions faster.
Equipment in the INRB laboratory produces millions of genetic code fragments in a single run. Previously, assembling a genome from these fragments was done manually by entering commands in a terminal, work that required a programmer. Claude Science, a version of Claude designed for research, assembles the genome from a plain-language request, builds a transmission tree showing who infected whom, and helps estimate the scale of the outbreak and detect new variants.
WHO is already applying the same approach to a chikungunya outbreak, a mosquito-borne fever occurring in the same region. The next goal is to link historical databases from past outbreaks so that new decisions can draw on prior experience from the start.
According to WHO data, by mid-September more than seven thousand Ebola cases and over three and a half thousand deaths had been confirmed across seven provinces in eastern Congo, compared with an estimated 4,900 cases and 2,300 deaths as of mid-August, when the PARTNERS treatment trial was just beginning. This is the second-largest documented Ebola outbreak in history, after the 2014–2016 epidemic in West Africa, which accumulated roughly 28,000 cases over two years; the current outbreak has reached a quarter of that total within a few months in a region with a long-running armed conflict.