Basecamp Research Ltd. said it raised $140 million from a group of prominent investors, funding the company will put toward accelerating its drug development work and expanding partnerships with pharmaceutical companies that can help bring its AI-designed medicines to market.
The company's flagship product is a foundation model built for medical research. The algorithm, called EDEN, has 28 billion parameters. It was trained on a dataset named the Trillion Gene Atlas, which Basecamp developed alongside Anthropic, Nvidia and other partners. That dataset holds information on more than 100 billion genes.
Basecamp's first target is using EDEN to help researchers develop in-vivo cell therapies, medicines that treat disease by altering a patient's cells. In many cases those changes are made by inserting specially designed DNA sequences into the affected cells. A human cell carries multiple DNA double helices roughly seven feet long, each storing what amount to recipes for making biological building blocks. Messenger molecules read the DNA, copy the recipes and carry them to cellular production lines, where the resulting building blocks drive the cell's internal processes.
In-vivo therapies of the kind Basecamp hopes to develop work by modifying those double helixes, temporarily splitting each affected helix and adding external DNA segments with therapeutic properties. The task is complicated for several reasons, among them that cells roll their double helixes into tiny coils with much less surface area. Researchers developing such a therapy must design the DNA segments and also find a way to deliver them into cells. Basecamp says its software meets that need with large serine recombinases, DNA delivery mechanisms derived from viruses known as bacteriophages.
Basecamp says EDEN also handles several related tasks. It helps researchers predict immune responses to a newly developed therapy, and it can be used to build entire cells, which can carry therapeutic cargo aimed at disease. Co-founder and Chief Executive Officer Glen Gowers said the company believes the future of medicine lies in reprogramming the body to repair itself, and that Basecamp designs the models and the medicines to teach it how.
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