Base­camp Re­search, an AI-fo­cused biotech start­up part­nered with Mi­crosoft and Nvidia, is set­ting off on its most am­bi­tious trek yet: To col­lect ge­net­ic se­quences of more than a tril­lion pro­teins in the next two years.

The Lon­don start­up un­veiled the ef­fort, which it is call­ing the Tril­lion Gene At­las, dur­ing Nvidia’s an­nu­al GTC con­fer­ence on Wednes­day. The pri­vate dataset would be or­ders of mag­ni­tude larg­er than what ex­ists in pub­lic data­bas­es. In an in­ter­view with End­points News, Base­camp co-founder Oliv­er Vince de­scribed the project as es­sen­tial for train­ing ever more pow­er­ful AI mod­els in bi­ol­o­gy that can pro­duce drugs on de­mand “to go from pa­tient to a cure.”

Al­ways be in the clin­ic — those are the "ABCs" of biotech, drug de­vel­op­ment vet­er­an Brig­gs Mor­ri­son tells End­points News. And that's pre­cise­ly where Mor­rison's Cross­bow Ther­a­peu­tics has been for the past few quar­ters with its first T cell en­gager.

The com­pa­ny now has plans to test a sec­ond can­cer drug in pa­tients this sum­mer thanks to a fresh $77 mil­lion fi­nanc­ing round. That Se­ries B marks the sec­ond ma­jor fi­nanc­ing in the TCE space to be an­nounced Wednes­day morn­ing, with Shang­hai-based Ex­cali­point ear­li­er ex­pand­ing its seed round to $68.7 mil­lion.

Cross­bow formed in 2021 and broke on­to the scene in Ju­ly 2023 with an $80 mil­lion Se­ries A. Since then, the Cam­bridge, MA-based start­up has "ba­si­cal­ly hit every­thing" that co­founder and cor­po­rate de­vel­op­ment leader Geral­dine Paulus laid out in its busi­ness plan years ago, CEO Mor­ri­son said in an in­ter­view.

As­pen Neu­ro­science said its ex­per­i­men­tal Parkin­son's dis­ease treat­ment, made from a pa­tien­t's own cells, showed en­cour­ag­ing re­sults in a small study.

The clin­i­cal tri­al builds on decades of stem cell re­search and marks an ear­ly test of a per­son­al­ized ap­proach to treat­ing the neu­ro­log­i­cal dis­ease.

In pa­tients with Parkin­son's, neu­rons die and can no longer make dopamine, which is crit­i­cal for move­ment. As­pen con­verts a pa­tien­t's skin cells in­to stem cells, then turns them in­to im­plantable dopamine-pro­duc­ing cells with the goal of re­plac­ing neu­rons.

Com­peti­tor Blue­Rock Ther­a­peu­tics has re­port­ed ear­ly clin­i­cal da­ta ahead of As­pen. Un­like As­pen, Blue­Rock re­lies on donor cells, an off-the-shelf ap­proach that may be faster to man­u­fac­ture, but that typ­i­cal­ly re­quires im­muno­sup­pres­sive drugs to pre­vent the body from re­ject­ing the ther­a­py.

Over a hot pot din­ner in Shang­hai in the fall of 2024, for­mer I-Mab Bio­phar­ma ex­ec­u­tives Lei Fang and Jielun Zhu be­gan to plot their next drug de­vel­op­ment start­up.

At the time, T cell en­gagers were gain­ing at­ten­tion as po­ten­tial can­cer treat­ments, Chi­na’s R&D en­gine was a top­ic in near­ly every bio­phar­ma deal­mak­ing con­ver­sa­tion, and a mod­el was emerg­ing in which West­ern in­vestors sprout­ed new US and Eu­ro­pean com­pa­nies around in­ves­ti­ga­tion­al med­i­cines li­censed from Chi­nese biotechs.

Now, Fang and Zhu are flip­ping the script on that mod­el. They li­censed two TCEs from Fang's for­mer em­ploy­er, Shang­hai-based Lepu Bio­phar­ma, and are keep­ing their new com­pa­ny in Chi­na to take ad­van­tage of the lo­cal ecosy