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news.UK-based Basecamp Research has secured $140m in a Series C funding round to train a new generation of its EDEN biological foundation models and advance AI-designed therapies towards clinical development.
Basecamp’s initial therapeutic focus is in vivo cell therapy, which involves reprogramming the cells of a patient inside the body. Credit: Basecamp Research.
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S32 led the oversubscribed financing round. Investors included Catalio Capital Management, European Tech Collective, and Firebrand River Capital.
Other backers were Nvidia, PostScriptum, Redalpine, The Rockefeller Foundation, Singular, Sovereign AI and True Ventures.
The company said the latest funding would also support an expansion of its pharmaceutical partnerships.
Basecamp’s initial therapeutic focus is in vivo cell therapy, which involves reprogramming the cells of a patient inside the body.
Its technology combines AI models trained on biological data with methods for writing deoxyribonucleic acid (DNA) sequences into cells.
Basecamp Research co-founder and CEO Glen Gowers said: “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.
“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 company said current cell therapies are constrained by the complexity of treatments and manufacturing costs that can reach hundreds of thousands of dollars per patient.
It is pairing EDEN’s ability to design long DNA sequences with large serine recombinases, which can integrate sequences into the genome.
To develop pharmaceutical relationships, the company has named former Biogen executive Richard Pearce as chief business officer. S32 general partner and former Google Verily CEO Andy Conrad will join Basecamp’s board of directors.
EDEN is trained on Basecamp’s Trillion Gene Atlas, a genomic dataset built through partnerships in more than 30 countries.
