Chroma Medicine highlighted data demonstrating the advantages of epigenetic editing for multiplex gene regulation at the American Society of Gene & Cell Therapy (ASGCT) 26th Annual Meeting in Los Angeles. The presentation entitled “Multiplexed Editing Without Chromosomal Rearrangements Using Epigenetic Editors” was given by Sahar Abubucker, senior director, data science. Chroma’s epigenetic editing platform harnesses the cell’s endogenous mechanism for regulating gene expression to durably modulate transcription without cutting or nicking the DNA, offering a potentially safer approach ..read more

LOS ANGELES — That the honor of opening the Presidential Symposium of the American Society of Gene and Cell Therapy (ASGCT) conference should fall to 2020 Nobel laureate Jennifer Doudna, PhD, the CRISPR genome editing pioneer, was no surprise. But the topic of Doudna’s presentation—new research in the arena of T-cell therapy—might have raised a few eyebrows in the packed audience. Doudna is the Li Ka Shing Chancellor’s Professor of Biomedical Science at the University of California, Berkeley, co-founder of the Innovative Genomics Institute (IGI), and an investigator with the Howard Hughes Medi ..read more

LOS ANGELES – David Liu, PhD, the Harvard University and Broad Institute chemist leading the development of base and prime editing technologies, began his American Society of Gene and Cell Therapy (ASGCT) presidential symposium keynote in humorous vein. That morning, Liu had breakfast with his parents, both non-life scientists, who live in the Los Angeles area. He told them he was in town to give an important lecture. How big would the audience be, they asked? Possibly in the thousands, Liu responded. It was unclear if his parents were surprised or impressed. But to leave no doubt, Liu took ou ..read more

Benjamin L. Oakes, PhD, Scribe Therapeutics co-founder, president, and CEO Scribe Therapeutics will partner with Prevail Therapeutics, a wholly owned subsidiary of Eli Lilly, to develop in vivo CRISPR-based therapies for “serious” neurological and neuromuscular diseases, the companies said today, through a collaboration that could generate more than $1.5 billion for Scribe. Scribe has granted Prevail exclusive rights to its CRISPR X-Editing (XE) technologies for the development of in vivo therapies directed to an undisclosed number of specified neurological and neuromuscular disease targets. T ..read more

A research initiative co-led by Nobel laureate and CRISPR pioneer Jennifer Doudna, PhD, has been awarded $70 million to address health and climate challenges by combining the genome editing technology with genome-resolved metagenomics through the microbiome. TED’s Audacious Project, a collaborative funding effort designed to help solve grand-scale social impact challenges, will award the $70 million toward “Engineering the Microbiome with CRISPR to Improve our Climate and Health.” Doudna and Jill Banfield, PhD, both of the Innovative Genomics Institute (IGI) at the University of California (UC ..read more

Haven Baker Cofounder and Chief Business Officer, Pairwise Food scientist and entrepreneur Haven Baker’s children are sick of kale. “My kids don’t want us to buy more salad kits with kale—they don’t want to eat it!” Baker told GEN Biotechnology. “They want to eat romaine lettuce.” Baker’s kids aren’t alone. In households across the US, kids and adults alike want nothing to do with the leafy superfood. “While things like kale have a lot of nutrition, most people don’t want to eat [bitter] greens,” said Baker, the co-founder and Chief Business Officer at the food tech company Pairwise. “People w ..read more

Sanofi will provide $25 million over five years to the lab of MIT’s Daniel Anderson, PhD, to support the lab’s efforts to develop next-generation delivery technology for messenger RNA. Anderson, who is a professor of chemical engineering and a member of the Koch Institute for Integrative Cancer Research and the Institute for Medical Engineering and Science, and others in his lab will use the funding to develop delivery technology for RNA vaccines as well as RNA that can be used for CRISPR-based genome editing. “Messenger RNA therapeutics have enormous medical potential, but new delivery techno ..read more

When you use CRISPR gene editing on crop plants, you can do “some pretty cool things,” says Timothy Kelliher, PhD, head of crop trait and technology discovery at Syngenta Seeds. You can change the structure of chromosomes, add large amounts of genetic material, move genes around, turn genes on and off, and fine-tune gene expression. And yet, Kelliher admits, inefficiency in bringing these cool things to commercial agricultural products is “still a problem.” So, why is CRISPR gene editing facing commercial challenges? There are several answers. One of them, Kelliher notes, is the difficulty of ..read more

Officials at Thermo Fisher Scientific and the University of California, San Francisco (UCSF) say a newly opened cGMP manufacturing facility adjacent to UCSF Medical Center’s Mission Bay campus will accelerate advanced cell therapies for difficult to treat conditions, including cancer, rare diseases, and other illnesses. The partnership between Thermo Fisher and UCSF, first announced in 2021, has the potential to demonstrate that having scientists, clinicians, and patients closer to a manufacturing site may expedite the development of breakthrough treatments, notes Michel Lagarde, executiv ..read more

Researchers from the Wellcome Sanger Institute and collaborators used human stem cells and neurons to investigate what features influence how well CRISPR activation works for different sets of genes. Their study “Massively parallel characterization of CRISPR activator efficacy in human induced pluripotent stem cells and neurons,” which appears in Molecular Cell, was designed to explain the rules determining to what extent genes respond to CRISPR activation, ensuring that future research can be designed as efficiently as possible. CRISPR activation (CRISPRa) is a type of CRISPR gene editing tha ..read more