Basecamp Research Launches Trillion Gene Atlas to Scale AI-Designed Therapeutics

The landmark initiative aims to expand known evolutionary genetic diversity 100-fold and enable AI systems to learn from nature to design new medicines on demand.

Mar. 18, 2026 at 9:57am

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Basecamp Research, a frontier AI lab for biological design, has announced the launch of the Trillion Gene Atlas, a scientific initiative to generate and model biological data at the trillion-gene scale. Launched in collaboration with Anthropic, Ultima Genomics and PacBio, and powered by NVIDIA AI infrastructure, the Atlas aims to expand known evolutionary genetic diversity 100-fold by collecting genomic data from more than 100 million species across thousands of sites worldwide. The goal is to provide the vast, diverse training data required for AI systems to learn from evolution and design new medicines on demand.

Why it matters

Current biological AI models are limited by the narrow slice of life on Earth represented in public databases. The Trillion Gene Atlas seeks to dramatically expand the known genetic universe, establishing a new paradigm for programmable therapeutic design. By learning from an unprecedented 10 billion new-to-science genes across 1 million newly discovered species, Basecamp's EDEN foundation models have already unlocked critical new scaling laws for AI in biology, moving beyond simple prediction to directly designing diverse therapeutics.

The details

The Trillion Gene Atlas builds on this approach by greatly expanding the breadth and contextual depth of genomic data in the known "internet of biology" suitable for AI training. Basecamp has partnered with Ultima Genomics and PacBio to deliver industrial-scale sequencing, including data-rich, high-accuracy long reads. The initiative will be powered by NVIDIA's accelerated computing infrastructure to process vast quantities of genetic data at the petabase scale. Through parallelized data processing, automated annotation, and large-scale model training, the partners expect to compress a task that previously would have required more than 20 years of processing time to less than two years.

  • The Trillion Gene Atlas was announced on March 18, 2026 at the SXSW conference in Austin, Texas and the NVIDIA GTC conference in San Jose, California.

The players

Basecamp Research

A frontier AI lab for biological design that is launching the Trillion Gene Atlas initiative.

Anthropic

An AI research company that is partnering with Basecamp Research on the Trillion Gene Atlas.

Ultima Genomics

A developer of ultra-high throughput next-generation sequencing (NGS) systems that is providing sequencing technology for the Trillion Gene Atlas.

PacBio

A company that provides HiFi sequencing technology to deliver highly accurate long reads, which will be used in the Trillion Gene Atlas.

NVIDIA

A technology company that is providing accelerated computing infrastructure to power the Trillion Gene Atlas.

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What they’re saying

“Today's biological AI models are trained on a narrow slice of life on Earth. The Trillion Gene Atlas expands the known genetic universe by orders of magnitude beyond what is in public databases. Training models at this scale establishes a new paradigm for programmable therapeutic design.”

— Glen Gowers, Co-founder and CEO of Basecamp Research (SXSW)

“Bigger models alone aren't enough. EDEN showed that performance in biological AI follows much steeper scaling trajectories with higher quality and fully contextualized data. The Trillion Gene Atlas extends that principle 100-fold.”

— Phil Lorenz, CTO of Basecamp Research (SXSW)

“Biology has been fundamentally data-starved when compared to other fields like language or computer vision as researchers have lacked the tools required to generate data at scale. We strongly believe that AI will have an immense impact on our understanding of biology and human health, and the UG200 Series was designed from the ground up to enable the massive datasets required for BioAI to deliver on this promise.”

— Gilad Almogy, Founder and CEO of Ultima Genomics (SXSW)

“PacBio HiFi sequencing delivers highly accurate long reads that preserve full genomic context and enables subspecies and even strain-level resolution in complex samples. HiFi data provides the reliable, information-rich foundation biological AI models need to learn from nature at scale and power initiatives like the Trillion Gene Atlas.”

— Christian Henry, President and CEO of PacBio (SXSW)

What’s next

The Trillion Gene Atlas is expected to compress a task that previously would have required more than 20 years of processing time to less than two years, significantly accelerating the pace of biological data generation and analysis.

The takeaway

The Trillion Gene Atlas represents a landmark scientific initiative that aims to dramatically expand the known genetic diversity on Earth, providing the vast, diverse training data required for AI systems to learn from evolution and design new medicines on demand. This collaborative effort between leading technology and life sciences companies has the potential to revolutionize the way we approach drug discovery and development.