Basecamp Research, an AI company dedicated to solving the most pressing challenges in life sciences, today announced that John Finn, PhD, will join as Chief Scientific Officer (CSO) as the company establishes a Boston lab and office to accelerate its pursuit of programmable genetic medicines.

“John is a globally recognized leader in cell and gene therapy who has spent more than 25 years pursuing extremely complex scientific and technological challenges,” said Glen Gowers, PhD, Basecamp Research co-founder and CEO. “With John’s experience, our huge data advantage, and our pioneering new class of foundation models, Basecamp Research is positioned to go beyond known biology and achieve groundbreaking advances that improve human health.”

Finn most recently served as Chief Scientific Officer of Tome Biosciences, where he pioneered new methods of large gene insertion for therapeutic applications. He also held senior leadership positions at Codiak BioSciences and Intellia Therapeutics. He has dedicated his career to advancing the field of gene and cell therapy through innovations in both delivery and editing technologies. He received his PhD in Biochemistry and Molecular Biology from The University of British Columbia and did post-doctoral research at McMaster University and the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia.

“I was drawn to Basecamp Research because of the incredible opportunity to develop the next generation of programmable genetic medicines and address challenges facing the field today,” Finn said. “Basecamp Research's advantage of a vast and unique dataset, combined with its next generation of AI models, really complements my experience in genetic medicines. I’m excited to see how we can leverage these synergies to continue my life’s mission of advancing scientific discoveries that can lead to new treatments for patients in need.”

Expanded Team and Footprint in Boston’s Kendall Square

Finn will join a growing team, including the company’s Chief Commercial Officer Anupama Hoey, at the company’s new lab and office in Kendall Square, a world-renowned biotechnology innovation district in Cambridge, Mass. These facilities add to the company’s ability to validate sophisticated biological systems designed by its foundation models.

Also joining the Cambridge office alongside Finn is Konstantinos Andrikopoulos, Senior Vice President for Intellectual Property. Andrikopoulos brings 27 years of pharma IP experience, including senior positions at Biogen, Tome Biosciences, and Vertex Pharmaceuticals.

Pairing Data with Compute to Enable Scaling of AI Foundation Models

To design these programmable medicines, Basecamp Research is building new classes of foundational AI models that are capable of tackling increasingly complex biological design challenges.

The Company’s recent $60 million Series B round has already fueled a rapid expansion of its proprietary foundational dataset, allowing it to collect 10 times more data in the last three months than was collected in the previous three years.

Alongside this expansion of data comes a corresponding expansion of computing power. Basecamp Research has built one of the most advanced industrial computing infrastructures in Europe. The cluster, comprising NVIDIA H200 GPUs, is one of the first to be purpose-built for training long-context AI foundation models. Basecamp Research needs this long context capability to work with the ever-increasing high-quality genomic data it is collecting around the world.

Basecamp Research has built one of the world’s largest commercial biodiscovery programs, spanning more than 120 locations in over 25 countries, to give its AI models a complete understanding of the true breadth and complexity of biology.

The Company uses this combination of proprietary data and powerful models in a wide range of partnerships, including a multi-year collaboration with the laboratory of Dr. David R. Liu at the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard and partnerships with three of the top 10 pharmaceutical companies.