Basecamp Research has raised $140 million (£106m) in Series C financing to continue developing its AI-designed medicines.
Basecamp’s ambition is to develop cures for diseases that remain incurable by designing medicines that reprogram the body to repair itself.
The company combines frontier AI models trained on proprietary biological data with technology for writing DNA sequences into cells.
“We believe the future of medicine lies in reprogramming the body to repair itself. We design the models and the medicines to teach it how,” said Glen Gowers, co-founder and CEO of the London company, which also has a US base including labs in Cambridge, Massachusetts.
“AI-based approaches promise to change what’s possible for patients who currently have few alternatives. This funding brings this technology closer to those who need it most.”
The oversubscribed round was led by S32, with participation from Menlo Ventures’ Anthology Fund, Catalio Capital Management, European Tech Collective, Firebrand River Capital, Inception Fund, King Philanthropies, NATO Innovation Fund, NVIDIA, PostScriptum, Redalpine, The Rockefeller Foundation, Singular, Sovereign AI and True Ventures.
Additional investment comes from senior leaders from across pharma, BioTech and global industry, including André Hoffmann, vice-chairman of Roche.
He said: “The biotechnology revolution that began fifty years ago transformed how we make medicines. Personalised, AI-designed therapeutics represent the next transformation of that journey. Basecamp Research has built the full platform to deliver it, from biological data to trained models to designed therapies. This will be key in helping the industry to continue to innovate.”
Basecamp Research is applying EDEN, its biological foundation model, to in vivo cell therapy – reprogramming a patient’s cells inside the body. Today’s cell therapies are limited both in the complexity of what they can deliver and by a manufacturing process that costs hundreds of thousands of dollars per patient.
By pairing EDEN’s ability to design long and complex DNA sequences with large serine recombinases that can precisely integrate them into the genome, Basecamp’s platform aims to underpin the future of cell therapies, making them more sophisticated, more customisable and simpler to administer. This has the potential to transform how we treat cancer, autoimmune disease, and more.
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The company has demonstrated strong preclinical results across multiple modalities and disease areas. To expand its pharmaceutical partnerships, Basecamp has appointed Richard Pearce, formerly of Biogen, as chief business officer.
Andy Conrad, general partner at S32 and former CEO of Google’s Verily, has joined the board of directors.
He said: “AI is opening up new possibilities across every part of society, but perhaps nowhere is the potential more meaningful than in human health. The ability to combine AI, biological data and scientific insight could transform how we understand disease, discover medicines and ultimately improve and extend people’s lives. Basecamp Research is building an important technology platform at the center of that opportunity.”
At the centre of Basecamp Research’s AI platform is the Trillion Gene Atlas, the world’s largest proprietary biological AI training dataset. Built with partners including NVIDIA, Anthropic, PacBio and Ultima Genomics, the Atlas draws on biological data collected through access and benefit-sharing partnerships in more than 30 countries across all seven continents.
Trained on this data, the company’s EDEN models recognise patterns across a huge breadth of previously unseen biology. Unlike AI systems developed for a single scientific task, EDEN models aim to deliver a universal understanding of how DNA works across all of life.
This means that the models can generate potential therapeutic candidates directly from information about a disease, an approach already demonstrated through Basecamp’s collaboration with Anthropic on Claude Science. The EDEN models’ capabilities include designing cell and gene therapies, enzymes and peptides.