British tech firm Basecamp Research is making a big push forward to further its mission of developing programmable genetic medicines. The company has hired gene therapy vet John Finn, Ph.D., to be its new chief scientific officer, working out of a new office and lab space in Cambridge, Massachusetts.
Meanwhile, back in the U.K., Basecamp is launching a Nvidia GPU computer cluster that is one of the biggest industrial high-performance clusters in the country, according to a Jan. 6 release. The cluster will power foundational artificial intelligence models of biological processes, co-founder Oliver Vince, Ph.D., told Fierce Biotech in an interview, and will run on renewable energy.
Finn is settling down at Basecamp after departing Tome Biosciences, which laid off 131 employees last August—essentially the entire workforce. Joining him at the Cambridge office are Chief Commercial Officer Anupama Hoey and Senior Vice President of Intellectual Property Konstantinos Andrikopoulos, according to the release.
“I'm incredibly proud of everything that we did at Tome, and I think we set out with a goal of solving a very hard problem,” Finn told Fierce in a joint interview with Vince. Addressing that problem will be his primary focus at Basecamp, he said: how to get large fragments of genetic material, like an entire healthy copy of a gene, into a specific location in the genome.
Finn’s tools of choice for this task are enzymes called large serine recombinases (LSRs), which he said are smaller than CRISPR and specifically evolved to handle large chunks of DNA at a time.
Importantly, he added, LSRs also integrate the new genetic material into the target site themselves; other gene editing tools break the genome at the target area but then rely on the host cell to repair the break with the new DNA.
“That's why things will work in one cell type and not other cell types, because that underlying host repair machinery is completely different depending on cell type,” Finn said. LSRs, he added, “are the only ones that do the entire reaction all by themselves.”
Using AI and biological tools like LSRs, Basecamp hopes to develop programmable medicines “that are cheap, that are repurposed in a week, that are applicable to any patient, Vince said. “The only way that's ever going to be possible is if a computer comes up with it.”
To fuel its efforts in therapeutics and beyond, Basecamp has leveraged partnerships in 25 countries to build the largest genetic database in the world, Vince said, consisting of genomic data from across the tree of life. The ultimate goal is to teach AI models to design biology, he said, from single enzymes up to whole genomes and entire life forms.
Basecamp secured a $60 million series B in October to expand its data collection efforts and strengthen its foundational AI models.