Basecamp Research launches world-first AI models for programmable gene insertion
- The breakthrough tackles a longstanding challenge in genetic medicine with the goal of developing a new generation of curative cell and gene therapies.
- Developed in collaboration with NVIDIA by training the largest evolutionary AI models on a new, globally collected dataset, accelerated by NVIDIA BioNeMo.
- The same versatile model also helped design novel antimicrobial peptide molecules with a 97% lab-confirmed success rate, including candidates that appeared highly potent against multidrug-resistant "superbugs."
- Basecamp Research also adds NVentures as an investor ahead of Series C round following deep technical collaboration on EDEN models.
LONDON and CAMBRIDGE, Mass., Jan. 12, 2026 /PRNewswire/ -- Basecamp Research, a frontier AI lab harnessing evolution to design new medicines, today announced the first AI models capable of programmable gene insertion, offering a new way to replace faulty genes and reprogram cells for therapeutic use. Trained in collaboration with NVIDIA, these models are driving the development of a new generation of treatments for cancer and inherited diseases. In parallel, Basecamp Research secured an investment from NVentures (NVIDIA's venture capital arm) in its pre-Series C round following years of close technical collaboration, which will help the company to accelerate its research and development efforts.
"We believe we are at the start of a major expansion of what's possible for patients with cancer and genetic disease," said John Finn, Chief Scientific Officer at Basecamp Research. "By using AI to design the therapeutic enzyme, we hope to accelerate the development of cures for thousands of untreatable diseases, potentially transforming millions of lives."
Programmable Gene Insertion
Programmable gene insertion - placing large therapeutic DNA sequences at precise locations in the human genome - has been a central goal in genetic medicine for decades. Existing CRISPR-based approaches can only make small edits and must damage DNA to do so, limiting where and how they can be used. Basecamp Research is the first to demonstrate that AI can design enzymes capable of performing large gene insertion at defined sites in the human genome, opening a long-sought path toward programmable therapies.
Basecamp Research's AI-Programmable Gene Insertion (aiPGI™) platform is powered by EDEN, a new family of evolutionary AI models developed with NVIDIA, trained on BaseData™, the company's proprietary genomics dataset - the largest of its kind. The models learn the language of DNA and patterns of evolution, allowing the algorithms to design new, programmable therapies for cancer and genetic disease.
In lab results published today in a paper co-authored by NVIDIA, Microsoft and leading academics, [link], the EDEN models designed multiple active insertion proteins for 100% of tested disease-relevant target sites in the human genome, requiring only the genomic target site as a prompt and marking a significant step forward in AI model capability.
Basecamp Research has already demonstrated insertion at over 10,000 disease-related locations in the human genome, including therapeutically relevant integration of cancer-fighting DNA into primary human T cells at novel safe-harbour sites. This produced CAR-T cells that show strong killing of cancer cells, showing over 90% tumour-cell clearance in laboratory assays.
AI-Designed Molecules To Fight "Superbugs"
In another key frontier therapeutic design task targeting the global drug-resistance crisis, the same model proved its versatility by designing a focused library of novel antimicrobial peptides (AMPs) – small proteins with the potential to kill harmful bacteria – with 97% of candidates demonstrating confirmed activity in laboratory tests. In a collaboration with University of Pennsylvania scientists led by Prof. César de la Fuente, the top-performing AMPs showed high potency against critical-priority, multidrug-resistant pathogens, offering a powerful new tool in the fight against dangerous "superbugs."
Breakthrough powered by unique data & frontier AI models
The EDEN models that power aiPGI™ were trained on over 10 trillion tokens of evolutionary DNA from more than one million newly-discovered species. This data was collected over five years from over 150 locations across 28 countries and five continents as part of a novel data collection strategy pioneered by the company, published in June 2025.
The largest EDEN model was trained on 1.95x1024 FLOPS of compute on a cluster of 1,008 NVIDIA Hopper GPUs and accelerated with libraries from NVIDIA BioNeMo, making it comparable in scale to GPT-4 class models and placing it among the most computationally intensive biological models ever reported.
Therapeutic assets in development
These capabilities underpin Basecamp Research's emerging pipeline of cell and gene therapies, opening the path to treatments that are more precise, predictable and personalised than those available today. The company's goal is to develop potentially curative therapies across a range of cancer and genetic disease indications, powered by continued improvements to BaseData™, the EDEN models and aiPGI™.
About Basecamp Research
Basecamp Research is dedicated to solving major challenges in the life sciences by exploring Beyond Known Biology™. The company builds frontier AI models using BaseData, the world's largest ethically-sourced and globally representative biological dataset. Basecamp Research collects and curates its own biological data through partnerships with more than 152 organizations in 28 countries, giving its AI access to genetic diversity that doesn't exist for models trained on public database sources. This allows Basecamp Research to design novel protein sequences and biological systems that can accelerate therapeutic research and development.
Basecamp Research partners with biopharma companies and academic institutions worldwide, and its work has been recognized with honors including Fast Company's Top 10 Most Innovative Companies in Biotech and the FT-backed Sifted AI100 list of Europe's leading AI startups. Learn more at basecamp-research.com.
BaseData™, Beyond Known Biology™, EDEN-GLM™ and aiPGI™ are brand names and technologies of Basecamp Research.
SOURCE Basecamp Research
Share this article