Basecamp Research Ltd. today announced that it has raised $140 million in funding from a group of prominent investors.
S32, a fund affiliated with Google LLC co-founder Bill Maris, led the Series C round. It was joined by more than a dozen other investors. The group included NATO, Nvidia Corp. and the Anthology Fund, a $100 million joint venture between Anthropic PBC and Menlo Ventures.
Basecamp’s flagship offering is a foundation model optimized for medical research. EDEN, as the algorithm is called, features 28 billion parameters. It was trained on a dataset called the Trillion Gene Atlas that Basecamp developed in collaboration with Anthropic, Nvidia and other partners. The dataset contains information on more than 100 billion genes.
Basecamp’s initial focus is using EDEN to help researchers develop in vivo cell therapies. Those are medicines that cure disease by changing some of the patient’s cells. In many cases, the changes are implemented by inserting specially designed DNA sequences into the affected cells.
A human cell contains multiple DNA double helices that are about seven feet long. Each double helix stores what are essentially recipes for making biological building blocks. Messenger molecules regularly “read” the DNA, create copies of the recipes and carry them to cellular production lines. The biological building blocks that those production lines manufacture power the cell’s internal processes.
In vivo cell therapies such as those Basecamp hopes to develop cure disease by modifying double helixes. In particular, they temporarily split each affected double helix and add in external DNA segments with therapeutic properties. Making such changes is highly complicated for multiple reasons. One of them is that cells roll up their double helixes into tiny coils with a significantly reduced surface area.
Developing an in vivo cell therapy requires researchers to not only design DNA segments but also find a way of inserting them into cells. According to Basecamp, its software addresses that requirement with so-called large serine recombinases. Those are DNA delivery mechanisms derived from viruses known as bacteriophages.
Basecamp says that EDEN also eases several related tasks. It helps researchers predict immune responses to a newly developed therapy. Furthermore, the model can be used to develop entire cells. Such cells can be equipped with therapeutic “cargo” that targets disease.
“We believe the future of medicine lies in reprogramming the body to repair itself,” said Basecamp co-founder and Chief Executive Officer Glen Gowers. “We design the models and the medicines to teach it how.”
The software maker will use its newly raised capital to accelerate its drug development efforts. Additionally, Basecamp plans to ink more partnerships with pharmaceutical companies that can help it bring its AI-designed medicine to market.
