Basecamp Research, a biotechnology startup focused on artificial intelligence, has raised $60 million in funding and signed a multi-year collaboration with the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard.
The London-based company said Wednesday that it will work with the lab of David Liu, a prominent gene editing researcher and biotech entrepreneur, to advance new types of “programmable” genetic medicines. The collaboration aims to invent “novel fusion proteins and other large molecules” that might enable those medicines, it said in a statement. Basecamp did not provide specifics.
The collaboration and funding are steps forward for Basecamp, one of many biotech startups trying to capitalize on the promise of AI in aiding pharmaceutical research. AI has been the focus of many recent industry partnerships, as its proponents believe the technology can make drug discovery more efficient. While there have been computing breakthroughs in areas like predicting how proteins change shape, AI’s broader potential in drugmaking hasn’t yet been fulfilled.
Basecamp is developing a database of biological interactions found in nature and using it to give artificial intelligence models more detailed training in biology. Basecamp intends this work to help with a variety of areas of research, from drugs and diagnostics to agriculture. The company has partnerships with 15 companies working in biological science, three of which are with large drugmakers, said CEO and co-founder Glen Gowers.
Basecamp says its database is larger than what’s publicly available to other researchers. Its executives also contend its approach is broader than that of most AI drug discovery companies, which, Gowers claims, are training AI by running a series of scientific experiments. That’s a “fundamentally quite archaic way of looking at AI,” he argues, because it limits what the technology can learn.
“AI is not magic,” he said. “It’s a pattern recognition tool that has creativity, but within the limits of what it’s already seen.”
In gene editing, drug researchers could benefit from a detailed look at the constant “warfare” between bacteria and viruses, Gowers said. Basecamp has been compiling data on the “weapons” used in those microscopic battles, which could be a resource to help uncover new gene editing approaches, he said.
Liu’s lab will use that information, though Gowers didn’t reveal details beyond the company’s announcement.
Basecamp’s Series B round was led by Paris-based venture firm Singular and backed by a number of life sciences and tech investors, including S32, Roche vice chairman André Hoffmann and former Unilever CEO Paul Polman. It has now raised $85 million since starting in 2019, and earlier this year hired Anupama Hoey, a former business development executive at biotechs Sutro Biopharma and Second Genome, as its chief commercial officer.
“Basecamp has dedicated itself to solving some of the toughest challenges in the life sciences and is taking a truly first principles approach to address questions that the biopharma industry hasn’t even known to ask,” Andy Conrad, a general partner at S32 and the founder of Alphabet’s Verily Life Sciences, said in a statement.
Basecamp will use new funding to continue building its database in the hopes of working with a “wider range” of biopharma companies, Gowers said.
