5HT #131: what Anthropic’s S-1 means for health, GLP-1s for addiction, and 3 more

Quick disclosure: I’m a (very) minor Anthropic investor. (I invested in 2024 and may see a 40-50x return in 2ish years, which is absurd and makes me doubt everything else I spend time on 😆.)

Now that that’s out of the way—the Anthropic S-1 dropped Monday. 

I'm a proud nerd and LOVE a good S-1. So fun, so much info, so many disclosures and potential risks!! This S-1 is particularly, er, seismic. The numbers in Anthropic’s filing are, no exaggeration, the most staggering I’ve ever seen 🤯. Or, to borrow Every’s Evan Armstrong’s one-word summary: “ridiculous.” We’re talking:

That’s cool. But what’s the health angle, Derek? Well they basically can’t stop talking about it in this S-1.

Biology and medicine come first on Anthropic’s list of where AI matters most—with visions of curing cancer, Alzheimer’s, heart disease, and rare genetic disorders. The growth strategy calls out healthcare and life sciences by name. There’s a whole Claude for Healthcare product, as we know. Pharma—a nearly $2T global industry—gets name-checked repeatedly as a drug discovery customer. (They also just released case studies on six research partnerships developing new medicine.)

Nine of the 10 largest pharma companies and 8 of the 10 largest healthcare companies are customers, already spending $100K+ a year with them. Healthcare, famously slow, is STILL working to “kill the fax machine,” but boy is it adopting Claude full tilt. 

Yes, the risk section is juicy (as with any great S-1). The S-1 flags that Claude is “deployed in high-risk or sensitive contexts, such as healthcare,” where hallucinations “could lead to serious harm.” (In fact, according to WSJ reporting, OpenAI retired GPT-4o partly because it couldn’t get a handle on its harms–and the NYT just published a tragic article about this same model.)

The line that stuck out to me most though is: “the long-term effects of regular AI interaction on mental health, cognitive development, and social behavior are not yet fully understood.” That’s a company admitting that it doesn’t know what its product does to your, my, all our brains over time. That's surely something to monitor.

Earlier this year Anthropic’s CEO, Dario Amodei, wrote an entire essay about how AI could “take over the world”—the same people building this technology are among those shouting about what could go wrong. The genius Matt Levine caught (and called out) this bit of passive voice in the S-1: “Concerns have been raised… within our organization… that sufficiently advanced AI systems could… pose catastrophic or existential risks to humanity.” Concerns have been raised, LOL! 💀

Net net: I believe in the “age of miracles” line from the founders’ letter. Maybe it’s AI-accelerated drug discovery. Maybe it’s care coordination that actually works. Or maybe it’s something no one’s named yet. What’s certain is that health will be a huge part of this story because the business is there and, more importantly, because the human need is. 

This IPO is a bellwether. If it works, the market stays in miracle mode. But if it doesn’t, it’s not just Anthropic’s problem… it’s everyone’s. 😬

Last week, Abbott (mostly known as a medical device company) announced plans to spin off its Nutrition business into an independent, publicly traded company by the end of 2027. 

You might not know it, but their Nutrition business gets $8.5B in annual sales (!) and includes some products you’ve heard of like Pedialyte, Ensure, PediaSure, Glucerna, and Similac. Are these “nutrition,” really? Sort of... Most actually need updates. But they’re HUGE products.

What interests me most is how neatly this fits the consumer health-ifying of healthcare I keep talking about. To me, it seems Abbott recognized the opp but also knew one part of their business could chase it faster than the other if unencumbered (I’ve been playing Outlier a lot, so feels like that’d earn a lot of points) by the rest. It makes sense.

Nicholas Gnan, a partner at Peers Capital, posed the right question: could independence give Abbott the freedom to move faster, sharpen its brand positioning, and compete more aggressively with the next generation of consumer health brands?

IDKID. Maybe if they get “the want” right. 😆

I said it back in June… and I’m even more convinced now that GLP-1s are becoming a first-line treatment for addiction.

Lilly is running two Phase 3 programs to test an experimental GLP-1 (a compound called brenipatide) in alcohol use disorder and major depression. Meanwhile, researchers from the Center for Addiction Science, Policy and Research (CASPR) and the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center (UPMC) plan to test Novo’s Wegovy for alcohol and opioid use disorders early next year.

If these trials are successful, it could be huge for addiction care. (As a reminder, we only have three FDA-approved meds for alcohol use disorder today.) 

That said, it does raise the question over unintended weight loss (or what I called “the side effect”). And it’s actually why Lilly is exploring brenipatide, which, they say, could help patients who don’t have obesity or diabetes avoid losing an unhealthy amount of weight.

Oh—also GLP-1s might become a first-line treatment for sleep apnea next (a recent NEJM study shows reta eliminated it in 25% of patients!).

The Assembly (which I wrote about last week) was the second conference where I handed out Fixie Dust. (Founderland was the first.) Now, they kinda sorta lost Fixie Dust for the first day and a half 😅,  buuut we were eventually able to find the sticks 🙏, and I got to encourage people to try the product.

Every time I do this, I learn something new. 

For one, the tear is easy (everyone but one person figured that out immediately) 😄. Buuuut whether you put all the powder in your mouth is not 🤨. (Some people thought yes, some people thought no, but once explained everyone got it) This reaffirms to me that visuals of “The Pour” in action will be critical. In the meantime, I’ll Fixie by example:

Initial reactions around the taste were also good. Better than I anticipated actually!

People also really told me they loved that you don't have to put it in water. 

But the best part was people going out of their way to stop me and tell me that they enjoyed how they felt after taking Fixie Dust. Multiple folks said it was a nice, focused “kick in the pants” in a way that clearly stuck with them enough that they got excited about it.

We had enough for about two sticks per person. And while not everyone took sticks, and a bunch of people just tried one, I kept seeing people who really enjoyed them hoarding them. That felt like the ultimate praise, which was really cool.

Next up, we’re finalizing the design of the pouches, revising the text on the sticks to be more legible, and filling up our waitlist. 

Also, our packaging is taking a liiitle longer than I’d like, so our launch date is more like December (which really means January) now 🙁. Buuuuut it’s going to be a big 2027 for Fixie Dust. 🧚

I’m challenging myself to be more active on LinkedIn (and accepting pointers)! I recently posted an article about this concept I’ve been noodling on for a while now, and I wanted to share a bit of it here. 

It all started when two friends of mine recently raised $228M to turn you into a health consumer. Nbd. First came Thatch, which raised $108M to rebuild “the wallet.” Then came General Medicine, which raised $120M to build out “the store” (and I wrote here). 

The wallet helps you afford and choose care. The store helps you find and buy it. Both will go a long way to consumer health-ifying healthcare (yes, it's a verb now), but there’s a missing piece.

I call it “the want.”

It’s everything that gets someone to choose care before they're forced to—and keep choosing it. And answers the question: do I want care? And here’s where it fits in: 👇

We haven’t had to ask that question, because healthcare hasn’t historically had to earn your business. But that’s changing.

Just look at the valuations of some of the leading health co’s today. Function Health. Oura. Prenuvo. Millions of people are paying cash for health with no insurer in the loop, and most of them aren't even sick. They just want to be WHOOP people. (Guilty. 🙋)

The same person who won't refill a statin will check their recovery score eight times a day and skip a beer to protect their sleep. The desire has been there all along. Healthcare just never earned it. 

We have to give people a reason to walk in—and keep walking in. My bet is the health co’s who don’t will fall behind. 🤷

The best framework I've found on how to build the want comes from my brilliant friend BJ Fogg, a Stanford behavior scientist. BJ boils it down to a three-part framework. (And spoiler, healthcare has historically sucked at all three.) 

On LinkedIn, I break down in looots more detail what activating the framework right looks like, why the winning strategy starts with one condition, and what I learned from failing to build all three at once. Whoopsie. 😬

3 other healthyish things I’m into right now:

Most clicked last week: Loveeee that y’all also love Ozlo Sleep Buds 🥹. (And, yes, they’d make a great Christmas/Hannukah gift!)

👋 Who are you again? I’m Derek Flanzraich, and I’m in the business of healthyish. I founded two venture-backed startups–Greatist (👍) and Ness (👎)—and helped dozens of brands you know grow including Ro, GoodRx, Midi, BetterHelp, and LMNT. I now run Healthyish Content, plus a few other healthyish things (like Fixie Dust, launching this fall).

Every Thursday, I share what’s hot, what’s not, and what’s next in consumer health. (Disclosure: I invest in and advise companies in this space—when I cover one, I'll say so.) I sometimes add affiliate links, but they influence my picks zero. Have something to share? Hit reply, I respond to every email.