Baseimmune: from an idea to early stage start-up

8th January 2020

Ariane Gomes

The UK SPINE co-sponsored a four day entrepreneurial Summer School in July 2019, open to biomedical scientists, data scientists and technologists from across the UK. The programme was co-hosted by the Francis Crick Institute, the Alan Turing Institute and Entrepreneur First. At UK SPINE, we are always looking to achieve maximum impact, and this was best illustrated by two individuals at the Summer School, who came together as a team and were accepted on to KQ Labs. The latter is a 16-week accelerator programme for early stage data-driven health companies run by the Francis Crick Institute. In this brief case study, Ariane Gomes talks about how she and her team have come to be interested in entrepreneurship and subsequently taken the opportunity offered to them in this Summer School to grow their idea into a high-potential venture called Baseimmune.

Why don’t you tell us a bit about how you became interested in entrepreneurship?

Entrepreneurship is becoming more and more a part of academic life. It is the buzz word of the moment in science, so our interest started as soon as we learned that this was an actual possibility for us. I met Joshua 5 years ago when both of us were doing our PhDs at the Jenner institute in Oxford University. In spite of working in different groups, we both shared long days in the lab and an interest in how to make the process of making vaccines more efficient and to benefit of the growing amount of data that has become available in the recent years. Joshua later introduced me to his long-time friend Phillip Kemlo, a computer engineer and software developer that has dedicated his career into translating ideas into computer language and real-world solutions.

So what does your company do?

Baseimmune is a company based on a bespoke data-driven platform that aims to change the way we make vaccines by turning big data in genomics, proteomics, and clinical data into information that can be incorporated into vaccine design. Baseimmune is a result of the application of deep-learning methods that harness databases on pathogens and the immune system. Our goal is to make the growing amount of data generated everyday by scientists all over the world into information that can be intelligible to vaccine developers. Baseimmune is currently working on different projects ranging from emerging veterinary viruses to several challenging human pathogens.

What has the impact of the Data Science x Biomedical Science Summer School been on the development of your company?

In July, Joshua and I were both selected for the summer school jointly run by the Crick, Entrepreneur First and the Alan Turing institute. Back then, we didn’t see ourselves as a team. Only at the summer school that we finally had our “eureka” moment and realised that in fact, we already had an organic team and the idea, all we needed was a way to materialise our long-standing interest in entrepreneurship in an actual start-up.

At the summer school, we were introduced to a range of inspiring speakers and peers, and in the end of the summer school we for the first time had not only a plan of action, but also a valuable network that is helping us to fill the knowledge gaps that we have as scientist and software developer to venture in the entrepreneurial world. After the summer school, KQ labs was the perfect next step for us!

It is hard to imagine where we would be right now had it not been for that first step in going to the summer school. And if I dare say, it does not seem unrealistic that we would still be sitting around, having endless conversations on how we would like to do something different without really knowing where to start. In spite of having the foundations of the platform, none of us really knew how to realise its full potential. The initiative of offering entrepreneurial training to highly technical and skilled scientist is filling a knowledge gap in the traditional PhD programs and giving the tools necessary to turn our training and ideas into real-world solutions.

Also want to attend the KQ labs summer school?

Ariane Gomes is a biologist specialised in immunology and vaccine development holding a DPhil in Clinical Medicine (University of Oxford, 2018). Ariane started her career working in the pharma sector (quality control) and moved to vaccine R&D later on her postgraduate studies. Her skillset includes development, characterisation and testing of novel vaccine platforms and adjuvants and the interactions of vaccines with the immune system. So far, she has contributed to pre-clinical development of 6 vaccines.

Joshua Blight has a DPhil in vaccinology and infectious diseases (University of Oxford, 2017) and has experience in using bioinformatic approaches to design vaccines against major infectious diseases and has overseen the preclinical development of over 5 vaccines. He has experience working with a broad spectrum of diseases from dengue and chikungunya to human papilloma virus (HPV) and malaria with two candidates proceeding to clinical trials.

Phillip Kemlo is a computer software engineer with a broad skill set including data management, system virtualisation and task level parallelism, with particular expertise in the design of complex logic systems. As a software consultant he has worked on a variety of projects developing a diverse library set including the development of the bespoke software and database that underpins the baseimmune platform and has resulted in 5 vaccines so far.