Basecamp Research - a mission to cure everything

British AI company with giant biology database promises new route to beating disease

Glen Gowers and Oliver Vince, co-founders, Basecamp Research

Every now and then in decades of covering business and technology I have come across an early-stage company which has impressed me so much that I decide it is going to be huge. Occasionally, my hunch turns out to be correct - after trying out Spotify at the urging of an investor in the music streaming business who told me he would clean my car if I didn’t like it, I became convinced that, for good or ill, it was the future of music. More often, I have got it wrong, though I will draw a veil over the companies that have belly flopped after I predicted they would soar.

But what is so exciting about my latest pick as a world-changer is that it is British and has the most noble of ambitions - to cure just about any disease you can name. One morning last month I caught the end of an interview on BBC Radio 4’s Today Programme with Oliver Vince the co-founder of Basecamp Research. He was talking about building a vast AI database of life on earth which would allow users to type in details of some disease and then spew out a recipe for a drug that might provide effective treatment.

I was intrigued, not least because I am currently writing a book about the hunt for a cure for Parkinson’s and the role that AI might play, and set about finding out more about the company. Ten days later, I found myself in the Farringdon district of London on a tour of Basecamp’s offices, which seem to be rapidly filling up with biologists, data scientists and AI specialists as the business expands. I had come to meet Oliver Vince and his co-founder Glen Gowers who apologised profusely for the late start to our meeting - they had been explaining the business to a potential investor, something which occupies more and more of their time.

Oliver, an engineer and computer scientist, and Glen, a biochemist whose PhD was about something called synthetic genomics, are both 31 and met while undergraduates at Oxford. That synthetic genomics doctorate, Glen explains, was about designing whole genomes and he had worked for a while with the drugs giant GSK exploring how to turn that idea into new drugs. Meanwhile, Oliver’s PhD was about brain cancer and finding new ways of delivering drugs to the right place.

But Basecamp did not begin as a medical project but as an expedition to the Arctic in 2019 to discover new species and genes. What was different was they took a portable lab with them -“we wanted to be the first team in the world to do fully off grid DNA sequencing in the Arctic,” Oliver explains. That meant that they got a far richer set of data, more than half of it relating to previously unknown life forms.

Having acquired a substantial database of organic life in the Arctic, their ambitions grew: “The light bulb moment,” says Glen, “was really saying, okay, we need to scale this up and have this kind of data that we've generated here, this new DNA data from new life forms that no one had studied before, but we now need to do this at the scale of millions of organisms, not just one or two studies.”

That was going to be hugely expensive so they needed two things - a backer and a business model. A friend of Glen - who now works for the business - introduced them to a venture capitalist: “He said, Hey, there's this group of people who, if you have a great and crazy idea, they'll give you money. And hey, here's the kicker, the crazier it is, the more money they give you..”

They got some funding but as the two co-founders admit, they had only the haziest vision of where what had turned into a global biological data-gathering exercise - during a pandemic - was heading as a commercial business. Then something happened which changed everything.

In October 2023 Oliver was diagnosed with an aggressive form of leukemia and found that he had what he describes as “quite gnarly” genetic mutations. He disappeared into hospital for months but he and Glen treated his life threatening disease as a puzzle the technology they were developing might solve.

“We were sat, genuinely, in the hospital room with a whiteboard, and we had all the pieces of the puzzle. And then the bit that we needed to do was say, Well, I got these really gnarly mutations. We need a tool that can swap them out..”

In the end, they did not have time to come up a new approach and instead Oliver had a stem cell transplant, which he describes as a hard reset of the immune system: “You have to be pretty young and pretty fit to take it… It’s pretty grim as an experience, but it is a hard reset.” Oliver is extremely grateful that he got a stem cell transplant and it seems to have worked, but Basecamp set to work creating something that would work for far more people.

That something was AI-programmable Gene Insertion (aiPGI) - a way of finding the rogue gene that causes cancer or other diseases and replacing it with some fresh healthy genes. At the heart of what makes this work is EDEN, an AI model built from all that new biological material gathered from around the natural world. At first the two founders struggle to find a phrase that sums up what EDEN is - a ChatGPT for biology perhaps? But somehow we settle on a Large Language Model whose language is DNA.

As they were developing EDEN, they worked first on problem solving for chemical companies - designing a plastic degrading enzyme, or a new skincare cream: “When we started out,” says Glen, “we couldn’t design medicine because the bar for medicine is so much higher and the requirements are so much more stringent.” But that changed as the model grew more sophisticated.

.They tested it on nine different disease genes, including Duchenne muscular dystrophy, cystic fibrosis and haemophilia B, and in each case the model came back with a credible solution in the form of a recombinase protein, a kind of lifeboat that seeks out the problem and mounts a rescue operation for healthy genes.

“Type in the disease gene, bang, here’s a drug that works,” explains Oliver. “And it’s not perfect, and there are ways to improve it, but these models are improving so quickly that I don’t think most of the world has appreciated what’s actually happening, honestly.”

I am finding it hard to get to grips with the scale of the achievement - “this sounds huge,” I say. “It is, correctly, absolutely enormous,“ says Glen. That is why investors keep on knocking at their door. But here he injects a note of caution about the time it could take to reach the point where their model could cure all diseases: “That journey, if that’s the end goal, could be up to twenty years. it could be thirty years, it could be five years, and it almost certainly will cost multiple billions of dollars.”

So they are on the lookout for patient investors who will not expect to make a quick exit having doubled their money. With the chip giant Nvidia already on board they have made a good start.

As with many AI projects, it is almost impossible for an outsider - especially one who gave up biology more than 50 years ago - to understand exactly what Oliver Vince and Glen Gowers have built. They are confident that nobody else has yet created anything like EDEN but with Google following its Nobel Prize-winning protein folding prediction model AlphaFold with AlphaGenome, promising better understanding of the genome, a formidable opponent is in similar territory. (Basecamp insists that while AlphaGenome can predict what DNA does, EDEN designs new biology and edits genomes.)

History shows that small firms with big ambitions like Basecamp usually either run out of money or end up being swallowed by a tech giant or a pharmaceuticals company. But I am hoping that this time is different and the company that began with a hunt for new life forms in the Arctic can go on to conquer the world.