Thanks for this! Looking at this from an outside perspective, it looks like so far their revenue and market opportunity comes from straight licensing of enzymes found in nature (https://matthey.com/media/2023/basecamp-research-partnership), but I'd bet that this is a limited business case. The market study you link on enzymes mentions deals like Roche licensing a DNA ligase, but I really doubt you're going to find a therapeutically useful DNA ligase hanging out in an ice crevice in the Antarctic.
I don't think protein generation as a business is as easy as they are making it out to be. A neat enzyme is a good first step, but there's so much more work to turning it into a business. To take your PCR example, none of the discoverers of Taq DNA polymerase made any money off of their discovery, mainly because the process of PCR was needed to make it useful. And developing PCR itself required a ton of extra work outside of just the polymerase, which presumably a company like Basecamp would not be equipped to do.
this is all super fair, agree theres a lot more work needed to actually establish the utility of an enzyme beyond its discovery alone
i do think their partnerships will help a lot with this tho! they probe partners to find good markets, discover what their pain points are, mine their data to help solve those pain points, establish the utility in-house, and license. over time, they'll get a stronger understand of where their dataset is most useful and will be able to preemptively come to the table with interesting suggestions on hand
i think it does take a huge amount of talking to customers, especially in emerging assay markets where the 'right' proteins needed arent established yet, but it feels very possible to make it all work
All of the "probing partners" is easier said than done. Like, take their partnership with Matthey. Matthey is an old, publicly traded company. Are they supposed to just let Basecamp look through all their data to see if there's anywhere Basecamp can help? What if Basecamp goes into the same business Matthey is in? Then Matthey is going to be pretty upset they let Basecamp probe them...
Interesting post! Biggest question to me is around the "match" process between the metagenomic stuff they discover and the needs that customers/the market might have. I totally buy the thesis that there's a lot of valuable metagenomic information out there, abstractly, but startups are intrinsically a bet with a short time horizon - can they find valuable/commercially viable metagenomic data fast enough to justify the cost of exploration, etc? Phrased differently, what makes this a good project for a startup and not a public-benefit basic research org like a FRO?
Still think this is cool - and a great gamble for ambitious scientists & VCs to make!
that's a fair point! and also where my mind immediately leapt to when i stumbled across this genre of 'metagenomic data company' (Fauna Bio is another example)
it is a bet to be sure, i didnt tack that on here because Basecamp has licensed away an enzyme, implying that their data is yielding *something* useful. but it is very fuzzy on how much the licensing is a 'this enzyme is incredible and we WILL use it' versus a 'it has good results in an assay, lets bring it in for further testing'. the future will tell us how much value the data really has in practice
i do think the whole mission is well suited for a startup! while FRO's like Cultivarium are doing really great work, the capital needed to acquire highly diverse datasets around the world + build the necessary assembly tooling to interrogate them + handle the legal issues involved in doing all of this seems super high.
my hope is that open-source things like Cultivarium works to help democratize the findings/tools that companies like Basecamp generate
Excellent post!
Thanks for this! Looking at this from an outside perspective, it looks like so far their revenue and market opportunity comes from straight licensing of enzymes found in nature (https://matthey.com/media/2023/basecamp-research-partnership), but I'd bet that this is a limited business case. The market study you link on enzymes mentions deals like Roche licensing a DNA ligase, but I really doubt you're going to find a therapeutically useful DNA ligase hanging out in an ice crevice in the Antarctic.
I don't think protein generation as a business is as easy as they are making it out to be. A neat enzyme is a good first step, but there's so much more work to turning it into a business. To take your PCR example, none of the discoverers of Taq DNA polymerase made any money off of their discovery, mainly because the process of PCR was needed to make it useful. And developing PCR itself required a ton of extra work outside of just the polymerase, which presumably a company like Basecamp would not be equipped to do.
this is all super fair, agree theres a lot more work needed to actually establish the utility of an enzyme beyond its discovery alone
i do think their partnerships will help a lot with this tho! they probe partners to find good markets, discover what their pain points are, mine their data to help solve those pain points, establish the utility in-house, and license. over time, they'll get a stronger understand of where their dataset is most useful and will be able to preemptively come to the table with interesting suggestions on hand
i think it does take a huge amount of talking to customers, especially in emerging assay markets where the 'right' proteins needed arent established yet, but it feels very possible to make it all work
All of the "probing partners" is easier said than done. Like, take their partnership with Matthey. Matthey is an old, publicly traded company. Are they supposed to just let Basecamp look through all their data to see if there's anywhere Basecamp can help? What if Basecamp goes into the same business Matthey is in? Then Matthey is going to be pretty upset they let Basecamp probe them...
Interesting post! Biggest question to me is around the "match" process between the metagenomic stuff they discover and the needs that customers/the market might have. I totally buy the thesis that there's a lot of valuable metagenomic information out there, abstractly, but startups are intrinsically a bet with a short time horizon - can they find valuable/commercially viable metagenomic data fast enough to justify the cost of exploration, etc? Phrased differently, what makes this a good project for a startup and not a public-benefit basic research org like a FRO?
Still think this is cool - and a great gamble for ambitious scientists & VCs to make!
that's a fair point! and also where my mind immediately leapt to when i stumbled across this genre of 'metagenomic data company' (Fauna Bio is another example)
it is a bet to be sure, i didnt tack that on here because Basecamp has licensed away an enzyme, implying that their data is yielding *something* useful. but it is very fuzzy on how much the licensing is a 'this enzyme is incredible and we WILL use it' versus a 'it has good results in an assay, lets bring it in for further testing'. the future will tell us how much value the data really has in practice
i do think the whole mission is well suited for a startup! while FRO's like Cultivarium are doing really great work, the capital needed to acquire highly diverse datasets around the world + build the necessary assembly tooling to interrogate them + handle the legal issues involved in doing all of this seems super high.
my hope is that open-source things like Cultivarium works to help democratize the findings/tools that companies like Basecamp generate