BASE4 Biosciences Is Building the Biological Atlas Women Were Never Given

In research for most of medicine's history, modern and traditional, the default human body that has been studied was male. Not because scientists were unaware that women existed, but because female biology, with its cyclical hormones, reproductive variability, and sex-specific tissue aging, was considered too complicated to account for. Too much noise in the data. Mind you, that doesn’t account for the compounded harm done to Black and brown women specifically, a group that has faced not just exclusion but active medical violence, rooted in pseudoscientific myths about pain tolerance and biological difference that persist in clinical practice to this day.

The consequences of that decision are still playing out in real time. Women are consistently diagnosed later than men for many ailments (~770 ailments and diseases, actually⁵), possibly because we present symptoms differently from men, which was never studied. The fact that ovarian tissue deteriorates much faster than tissue in other parts of the body, for example, has enormous implications for reproductive health, hormonal transitions, and long-term disease risk.

This is the gap that BASE4 Biosciences, a Barcelona-based startup, is trying to close, and they just raised $1 million in pre-seed funding to do it¹. They’re making a direct bet that this problem starts at the data layer.

What BASE4 Is Actually Building

The core technology is a multiomic platform built to assess the biological condition and aging of 47 distinct tissues using nothing more than a single blood draw. That scope alone is raising my eyebrow! Not one organ. Not a handful of biomarkers. Forty-seven tissues: spanning hormonal, reproductive, cardiovascular, cognitive, digestive, renal, bone and muscle, and respiratory health². Each evaluated through models built specifically around female biology rather than retrofitted from the male-centric research that became the default, even though it scientifically shouldn’t.

The platform integrates transcriptomics, genomics, and AI, leveraging more than 15,000 genes and hundreds of metabolic pathways to produce organ-level health insights across nine functional domains. The female-focused targets specifically include hormonal health, reproductive organs, cardiovascular function, cognition, and mammary tissue, among others².

Critically, BASE4 is claiming the ability to identify molecular-level signs of tissue dysfunction before a patient feels anything and before standard diagnostics would catch it. That's a meaningful distinction. Most of what we call "early detection" in medicine still happens after biology has already been misfiring for a while. A tool that reads the signal earlier is a different category of intervention, one that I hope will change and save immeasurable lives.

Why "Sex-Specific Models" Is the Whole Point

It would be easy to read this as a women's health company that also does some interesting omics work. But the sex-specific modeling isn't a feature, it's the whole scientific point.

Here's the foundation: until the NIH Revitalization Act of 1993, women were systematically excluded from clinical trials³. But by that point, the foundational data infrastructure of modern medicine had already been built largely without them. The biological variability that comes with cycling hormones, reproductive aging, and sex-specific tissue behavior was treated for decades as a methodological inconvenience rather than a legitimate biological phenomenon worth understanding.

The downstream effect wasn't just a gap in representation. It was a gap in biological data. Reference ranges for common biomarkers, disease progression models, diagnostic thresholds, basically the whole infrastructure and system of modern medicine was built on a dataset that treated male biology as universal. Are you surprised?

Female hormonal variability was coded as a confounding variable, when it should’ve been viewed as an independent variable in my opinion. We now know, for example, that sex hormones do contribute to immune responses⁴. These differences were viewed as something to control for, not something to understand. The result is that we have remarkably detailed maps of male physiology and comparatively thin maps of female physiology, particularly for how female tissues age, how they respond to stress, and how early dysfunction actually presents at the molecular level.

BASE4's argument is that better intentions won't close that gap. The fix has to happen at the level of the models themselves, built from the ground up to treat female biological variability as meaningful information rather than noise to be smoothed out. Sex-specific models, built on sex-disaggregated biology, that treat female variability as the signal it always was.

Three Clinical Programs, One Foundational Goal

The company has three clinical programs in the works, and there’s even a waitlist to use them².

The first targets fertility and women's health, with a particular focus on ovarian biology and the biological transitions around menopause. This gap between what women experience and what medicine can currently explain is especially wide.

The second is a preventive health program aimed at catching early molecular dysfunction before it becomes clinically visible.

The third is a pharma-facing arm that applies the platform to drug development. Specifically, they want to detect how treatments affect tissue at the molecular level earlier and with more precision than existing methods allow.

That third program has broader implications. If the platform can provide earlier, sex-disaggregated readouts of how a given compound is affecting specific tissues, it becomes a tool for designing better trials, not just reading individual biology. That's leverage at the research infrastructure level, which is where some of the most durable change tends to happen.

The $1M pre-seed round was backed by four VC firms and other angel investors and has operations in both Barcelona and Riyadh¹.

Worth noting: the advisory board includes Dr. Oliver Zolman, medical director of Bryan Johnson's longevity program, meaning that BASE4 is positioning itself squarely within the broader biological age and longevity conversation, not just women's health in isolation.

The Number That Should Bother You

A million dollars is a modest number for a platform with this level of ambition. Building multiomic infrastructure, training AI models across 15,000 genes, validating tissue-level readouts across 47 organ systems… none of that is cheap, and $1M doesn't go far in that direction.

It's also worth being transparent about where the platform currently stands: BASE4's reproductive health test is not yet CE-marked and is not approved to diagnose, treat, or prevent any medical condition². Results are meant to be discussed with a clinician, not acted on independently. That's not a knock on the company. Most early-stage biotech is working toward regulatory clearance, not starting with it. But it matters for how you interpret the early detection claims. Promising molecular signals are not the same as validated clinical diagnostics, and that distinction is important.

That said, the scientific direction is wonderful. The foundational argument that female biological variability has been treated as noise when it is actually data is both well-documented and underacted upon. If BASE4 delivers on what it's promising, the implications extend well beyond any single test: earlier detection, better-designed trials, and a biological map of female health built on female biology for the first time.

That's worth watching.