Basecamp Research announced on 30 June that its EDEN antibiotic design and vaccine target prediction models are now available through Claude, including Claude Science, Anthropic’s AI workbench for life sciences research. Researchers can access the models in Claude.ai, Claude Desktop, Claude Mobile, Claude Code and Cowork.
The antibiotic side of EDEN was validated in collaboration with the University of Pennsylvania’s Machine Biology Group, led by César de la Fuente, a Fleming Prize winner and Presidential Associate Professor. Testing showed that 97% of antibiotic peptides designed by EDEN were active against WHO priority pathogens in the laboratory. One candidate, EDEN-7, was tested in mice against multidrug-resistant Acinetobacter baumannii, a pathogen associated with hospital outbreaks, and showed efficacy in the same range as a last-line antibiotic despite being generated zero-shot, with no iterative engineering after the initial output.
Glen Gowers, co-founder and CEO of Basecamp Research, described the underlying logic: “Microbes have been producing antibiotics and evolving resistance to each other for billions of years. EDEN learned from that history, and now, through Claude, researchers all over the world can design successful new antibiotics in minutes, not years.”
The vaccine prediction model identifies which proteins are most likely to trigger a protective immune response, outperforming comparable genomic foundation models according to the company. Integrated with Claude, it allows a researcher to describe a pathogen in plain language and receive a shortlist of prioritised vaccine targets within a single conversation, reducing what can be several weeks of laboratory triage work.
César de la Fuente said of the antibiotic research: “This collaboration shows how frontier biological foundation models can be paired with rigorous experimental validation to accelerate antibiotic discovery. Antimicrobial resistance is one of the greatest existential threats facing humanity and collaborations like this between academia and industry are critical.”
EDEN is trained on BaseData, Basecamp Research’s biological database assembled from expeditions to more than 200 locations across 30 countries, including thermal springs, deep-sea sediment and polar ice. The dataset covers more than a million species new to science and more than 10 billion genes, roughly ten times the content of all public databases combined. Basecamp Research is scaling BaseData through the Trillion Gene Atlas, a partnership with Anthropic, NVIDIA, PacBio and Ultima Genomics targeting trillion-gene scale data for AI-driven drug discovery.
Jonah Cool, Head of Life Sciences Partnerships and Deployment at Anthropic, said the integration addressed two of the most acute public health challenges in life sciences: “Making EDEN available through Claude Science gives researchers a new way to explore and prioritise treatments for some of the most dangerous pathogens on Earth.”
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