Fairfield Bio, a New York City-based startup that is officially launching at Science House during the World Economic Forum annual meeting in Davos January 19-23, is building what it says is the world’s first marketplace for non-human genomic data.
Out of somewhere between 10 million and one billion species on earth, scientists have full genomic sequences for only about 15,000 of them. This tiny fragment has unlocked CRISPR, GLP-1 weight loss drugs, vaccines, cancer therapeutics, pesticides, and more.
“Imagine what we could do if we could unlock the 99.9% of data that we don’t have, “says Kevin Slavin, the co-founder of Fairfield Bio. He and Co-founder Mitch Wolfe, a former Chief Medical Officer for the U.S. Center for Disease Control (CDC), are both scheduled speakers at Science House, an initiative of Frontiers, the open science publisher.
AI is only as good as the data it is trained on. But right now, most non-human genomic data is either missing, locked, or bottlenecked by misaligned incentives and unclear legal rights, says Wolfe. While at the CDC he helped set up national health systems and labs in developing countries, which often have sovereign rights to genomic data of indigenous plants and animals. Sharing has slowed, and sometimes stopped, because data providers lack recognition, clear rights, and incentives. “There are disincentives on both sides – countries have had their data exploited and companies don’t feel safe about securing rights – they need to know clearly who they have to pay and how much, and what are their legal obligations,” says Wolfe. “ Policy’s best intentions haven’t fixed it.”
Fairfield Bio’s marketplace aims to solve this by giving an incentive to both sides to discover and share data, says Wolfe. The idea is to establish a way that assures benefits to the providers and grants clear legal protections for the users, he says. “One problem is that we don’t have the data,” says Wolfe, “the other problem is that no one can get the data, if there’s no incentives and protections to people who provide it.”
“On and off I’ve spent a decade on environmental genomic sensing, Mitch spent 20+ years at the CDC, plus his role as Deputy Assistant Security for Global Affairs at the U.S. Department of Health & Human Services, and we worked together in our years at Ginkgo Biosecurity,” says Slavin. “We have seen these problems up close, we know them well, and we’re resolved to build a solution for them.”
Fairfield Bio’s marketplace is based on three principles: recognizing that out-of-distribution data is invaluable for biology R&D and AI; anyone who helps produce that data should benefit when it’s commercialized; and that everyone should have clear and legal access to everything Fairfield Bio aggregates and protects.
There are two layers: one is the data of the genomic sequences and the annot no ations to make them valuable. The other is a commercial layer that includes contractual agreements and terms of use. “You could think of it in some ways as a distant descendant of Creative Commons,” says Slavin, because it builds on some of the same principles: the work must be attributed and people who want to use the content for non-commercial purposes are free to do so. In the event of commercialization, however, the providers of the data share the value created.
Farifield Bio’s marketplace will be membership driven. It will vet suppliers of data to make sure they have the right to provide it and validate that the genomics have been properly sequenced, says Slavin. Similarly, they will vet the users of the data to ensure that they are valid and committed to the terms of use. “We are not in the business of enforcement or litigation around commercial violations, any more than any other marketplace. But we are providing the legal frameworks that can be enforced, which have been missing for decades. The goal is to to solve these problems through incentives, rather than best intentions or legislation.”
“Any solutions built for everyone need to come from everywhere,” says Wolfe. “That is why we want to incentivize everyone to participate by making a marketplace that eliminates the friction and risk that’s bottlenecked genomic data for so many years. Think of what we’ve discovered with the 0.01%… what’s out there to be discovered is beyond imagination. The only way we are going to find out is by unlocking as much as we can.”
The marketplace will court many types of research and development organizations as customers, for example: biotech, agtech, pharmaceutical companies, academia, and the food industry, and they have already used this type of data to build blockbuster drugs and incredible laboratory, pesticide, and food advancements. Slavin cites three examples: Research on Gila monster venom in the 1990s led to the discovery of exendin-4, which inspired the development of GLP-1 receptor agonists used in weight loss drugs like Wegovy and Ozempic. Vinblastine and vincristine, which were approved by the US Food and Drug Administration as chemotherapeutic agents for the treatment of several types of cancer, are derived from the Madagascar periwinkle flower. And rapamycin , which was initially developed as an immunosuppressant to prevent organ transplant rejection and to improve the efficacy of stents to treat coronary artery disease and since expanded to treat various types of cancer, was discovered in soil from Easter Island, as an antibiotic produced by an aerobic Gram-positive bacterium.
“What’s crazy is how much has come out of the 15,000 fully-sequenced non-human sequences we have,” says Slavin. “There’s maybe a billion to go. There is no telling how many more transformative discoveries lie in the remaining 99.9%. Probably more than three.”
Others who may be interested in joining the marketplace include industrial companies researching ways to improve their products.
The primary providers of genomic data are national labs which have the access and explicit rights to the genomic data for species that are sovereign to their territory. But the field of providers is much broader than Fairfield Bio imagined, says Slavin. For example, a flower researcher in Europe working on bespoke modifications of flowers that are uniquely sources from a jungle in South America, has already reached out to the startup.
Other companies, such as the UK’s Basecamp Research, are also trying to widen the database of sequenced non-human genomic data and in doing so advancing drug development.
On January 12 Basecamp Research announced the first AI models capable of programmable gene insertion, offering a new way to replace faulty genes and reprogram cells for therapeutic use. Trained in collaboration with Nvidia, these models are driving the development of a new generation of treatments for cancer and inherited diseases.
Programmable gene insertion – placing large therapeutic DNA sequences at precise locations in the human genome – has been a central goal in genetic medicine for decades. Existing CRISPR-based approaches can only make small edits and must damage DNA to do so, limiting where and how they can be used. Basecamp Research is the first to demonstrate that AI can design enzymes capable of performing large gene insertion at defined sites in the human genome, opening a long-sought path toward programmable therapies.
Basecamp Research’s AI-Programmable Gene Insertion platform is powered by EDEN, a new family of evolutionary AI models developed with Nvidia, trained on BaseData, the company’s proprietary genomics dataset. The models learn the language of DNA and patterns of evolution, allowing the algorithms to design new, programmable therapies for cancer and genetic disease.
In parallel, Basecamp Research secured an investment from NVentures (NVIDIA’s venture capital arm) in its pre-Series C round following years of close technical collaboration, which will help the company to accelerate its research and development efforts.
Basecamp Research does some of the same things that Fairfield Bio does, says Slavin, which enables them to generate such novel capabilities. It gathers novel data from around the world, and it compensates the providers. What it doesn’t do is make that novel genomic data accessible for free to all researchers who want to advance science, and rapidly accelerate progress for everyone looking to learn from the natural world. That is an essential aspect of Fairfield Bio’s mission, he says. The company is currently raising a pre-seed round of funding.
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