Fifty percent. That was the share of AI-designed proteins that worked in human T cells in a preprint from Basecamp Research, and it helps explain why investors just handed the London company $140 million.
Basecamp announced the Series C on September 23. S32 led the round, and Andy Conrad, a general partner at S32 and former CEO of Google’s Verily, joins the board. Other backers named include Menlo Ventures’ Anthology Fund, NVIDIA, Catalio Capital Management, European Tech Collective, Firebrand River Capital, King Philanthropies, the NATO Innovation Fund, Redalpine, The Rockefeller Foundation, Singular, Sovereign AI and True Ventures. André Hoffmann, vice chairman of Roche, is among the investors from biopharma and other industries.
One correction on the cast list. Basecamp’s original press announcement wrongly named Anthropic as an investor, and BioSpace changed its story on September 25 to reflect that. Anthropic is a data partner, not a backer.
Cell therapy from inside the body
The money pays for training the next generation of EDEN, Basecamp’s biological foundation model, and for moving its AI-designed therapies toward clinical development. It will also fund more partnerships with drugmakers, a job handed to new chief business officer Richard Pearce, who comes from Biogen. No date has been given for a first clinical trial.
The initial focus is in vivo cell therapy, which reprograms a patient’s cells inside the body. Basecamp says today’s cell therapies are limited in the complexity of what they can deliver and rely on manufacturing that costs hundreds of thousands of dollars per patient. Its answer pairs EDEN’s design of long, complex DNA sequences with large serine recombinases, proteins meant to insert those sequences into the genome. If that works in vivo, European Biotechnology Magazine noted, it could skip some of the manufacturing steps behind conventional CAR-T treatments. The company points to cancer and autoimmune disease as targets.
“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.
The data behind it
EDEN is trained on the Trillion Gene Atlas, which Basecamp calls the world’s largest proprietary biological AI training dataset. It was built with partners including NVIDIA, Anthropic, PacBio and Ultima Genomics, from samples gathered through access and benefit-sharing partnerships in more than 30 countries across all seven continents. Launched in March, the name is an ambition rather than a count. The company’s website reports more than 100 billion novel genes so far.
In the preprint, EDEN designed DNA-inserting proteins from a target sequence only 30 DNA letters long, including sequences absent from its training data. The functional hit rate was 63.2%, roughly six in ten designs showing activity in lab assays. Half of 20 proteins tested inserted a CD19 CAR construct into human T cells. Separately, 32 of 33 AI-designed antimicrobial peptides were active against bacteria, including multidrug-resistant strains.
Basecamp’s website lists three in vivo CAR-T programs. One for blood cancers and one for an undisclosed autoimmune indication are in lead optimization, and a solid-tumor program is in discovery. It also lists a gene-insertion program for phenylketonuria, antimicrobial peptides and a diabetes-focused peptide program.
The round lands in a busy stretch for AI-led biotech. BioSpace pointed to Isomorphic Labs, which closed a $2.1 billion Series B in May, and Enveda, which raised $311 million in Series E money on the same Wednesday as Basecamp’s announcement.
Sources
- Basecamp Research Raises $140M Series C to Train New EDEN Models
- Backed by NVIDIA, Basecamp bags $140M to advance AI-designed drugs
- Basecamp Research raises $140M for AI-designed cell therapies – European Biotechnology Magazine
