Scientists can now design potent antibiotics and rapidly prioritise vaccine targets through Claude Science, thanks to integration with Basecamp Research’s EDEN models.
LONDON and CAMBRIDGE, Mass., July 1, 2026 /PRNewswire/ — Basecamp Research today announced that its antibiotic design and vaccine target prediction EDEN models are now available through Claude, including Claude Science, Anthropic’s AI workbench for life sciences research. This allows researchers to generate and prioritise therapeutic candidates through a conversational interface in a matter of minutes.
By combining Claude’s reasoning with EDEN’s biological design capabilities, researchers can now go straight from a target to a shortlist of high-performing antibiotic or vaccine candidates. This capability is available in Claude.ai, Claude Desktop, Claude Mobile, Claude Code, Cowork, and Claude Science through Anthropic’s connectors directory.
The world needs new antibiotics
Drug-resistant infections play a role in nearly 5 million deaths per year, but the pharmaceutical industry has largely retreated from antibiotic development. New antibiotics are badly needed, particularly for the pathogens spreading fastest in lower-income countries where last-resort drugs are hardest to access.
“Microbes have been producing antibiotics and evolving resistance to each other for billions of years,” said Glen Gowers, Co-founder and CEO of Basecamp Research. “EDEN learned from that history, and now, through Claude, researchers all over the world can design successful new antibiotics in minutes, not years.”
In collaboration with University of Pennsylvania researchers, Basecamp Research demonstrated that 97% of the antibiotic peptides designed by EDEN are active against World Health Organisation (WHO) priority pathogens when tested in the lab. Fleming Prize winner and Presidential Associate Professor César de la Fuente led the work by UPenn’s Machine Biology Group.
One candidate, EDEN-7, was tested in mice infected with multidrug-resistant Acinetobacter baumannii – a pathogen associated with hospital outbreaks worldwide – and showed efficacy in the same range as a last-line antibiotic, despite being generated zero-shot, meaning the model produced it without subsequent optimization or iterative engineering.
“This collaboration shows how frontier biological foundation models can be paired with rigorous experimental validation to accelerate antibiotic discovery,” de la Fuente said. “Antimicrobial resistance is one of the greatest existential threats facing humanity and collaborations like this between academia and industry are critical.”
Finding vaccine targets in minutes
Developing a vaccine against an emerging pathogen is a race against time. Which part of the pathogen to target is often determined empirically, which can take months of laboratory work. This delay often costs lives.
EDEN’s vaccine design model identifies which proteins are most likely to trigger a protective immune response, outperforming comparable genomic foundation models. By integrating it into Claude, researchers can describe a problem in plain language and have Claude run a prioritisation workflow against the pathogen’s genetic sequence. This can reduce several weeks of research per pathogen into a single conversation.
A growing collaboration
“The antibiotic crisis and the need for new vaccines are two of the most important public health challenges of our time,” said Jonah Cool, Head of Life Sciences Partnerships and Deployment at Anthropic. “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.”
Built on the world’s largest biological dataset
Most biological AI models are trained on a narrow set of well-studied organisms – the ones scientists have already catalogued. In contrast, EDEN is trained on BaseData, the largest, fastest-growing and most information-rich biological database on Earth.
To build it, Basecamp Research has run expeditions to over 200 locations across more than 30 countries, sampling the places life is strangest and least understood, including thermal springs, deep-sea sediment, polar ice, remote high-altitude plateaus. In the process, it has documented more than a million species new to science. The result is over 10 billion new genes and roughly ten times the content of every public database combined.
Basecamp Research aims to scale BaseData 100-fold over the next two years through the Trillion Gene Atlas, a partnership with Anthropic, NVIDIA, PacBio and Ultima Genomics designed to generate genomic data at the trillion-gene scale for AI-driven drug discovery.
Diversity is what drives EDEN’s performance across a wide range of tasks. Every sample is collected under informed-consent and benefit-sharing agreements so that the countries and communities who steward this biodiversity share in the value it creates, with each sequence traceable to one of hundreds of country-specific permits. This allows a portion of revenue to be fed back to the country and community where the data was originally sourced, setting a standard of data provenance that the rest of the field has yet to match.
About Basecamp Research
Basecamp Research is dedicated to solving major challenges in healthcare and life sciences by exploring Beyond Known Biology™. The company trains frontier AI models on BaseData, the world’s largest biological dataset, collected through partnerships with more than 200 organisations across more than 30 countries. Basecamp Research is developing a pipeline of therapeutics and works with commercial and academic partners worldwide to accelerate therapeutic discovery and development.
BaseData™, Beyond Known Biology™, EDEN-GLM™ and aiPGI™ are trademarks and technologies of Basecamp Research.
SOURCE Basecamp Research
