Still a relatively new technology, CRISPR has been heralded in recent years as having the potential to tackle a range of diseases. And now, it has finally proved its worth. In a world first, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has approved CASGEVY – the CRISPR-based gene therapy developed by Vertex Pharmaceuticals and CRISPR […]
On January 7, 2022, a surgery was performed on David Bennett to give him a new heart. But this was no ordinary transplant surgery. Instead of receiving a heart from a human donor, the 57-year-old, who did not qualify for a traditional transplant, received a pig heart. This surgery marked a historic breakthrough, becoming the […]
Over the past couple of years, base editing, a recent offshoot of the heralded CRISPR/Cas 9 technology, has been doing its rounds in the biotech space. Now, base editing has finally set foot into clinical trials for the first time in the U.S.. American precision medicine company Beam Therapeutics treated its first patient with its […]
For many people, when they hear China and genetic engineering in the same sentence, it is often synonymous with scandal, and gene-edited babies may spring to mind. And, although it is true that nearly five years ago, researcher He Jiankui infamously claimed he had created the first ever gene-edited babies, before going to prison for […]
A research team from the LKS Faculty of Medicine, the University of Hong Kong (HKUMed) has developed a new way to break through the current limited throughput in optimizing precise genome editors at scale, engineer hundreds of base editor variants in parallel instead of current one-by-one testing, and informing users of the most suitable ones […]
HuidaGene Therapeutics, a clinical-stage genome-editing company, says the National Science Review has published data from its study of the world’s first DNA base editor converting guanine to cytosine/thymine (pyrimidine), or G-to-Y. The company has filed an international patent application for the glycosylase-based guanine base editor (gGBE) and owns the exclusive global rights to the underlying […]
A condition that affects around five million people worldwide, lupus has no proven cure. But various treatments for the disease have been around for more than a century, and lupus research has grown over the years. The first kind of therapy for the autoimmune disease – which occurs due to an overactive immune system that […]
Eterna Therapeutics Inc. has announced the acquisition of the global immuno-oncology platform of Exacis Biotherapeutics. The acquisition complements Eterna Therapeutics’ core business with a pipeline of allogeneic immuno-oncology products under development for the treatment of hematologic and solid tumors and provides Eterna Therapeutics with an exclusive global license to produce an unlimited number of mRNA-engineered […]
The Hello Tomorrow Global Summit took place in Paris last week (March 8-10), and we feature interviews with four of the participants. Our guests this week are: FreezeM CEO and co-founder, Dr. Yuval Gilad; Allogenica CEO and co-founder Inna Menkova; George Frodsham, founder and CEO of MediSieve; and Poulami Chaudhuri, co-founder, and CEO of Helex […]
The concept of de-extinction has been around for many years. Once considered a fanciful idea, recent advancements in technology – notably CRISPR – have made bringing back extinct animals such as mammoths an extremely feasible proposition that investors are willing to put their money into, with an aim of reversing and preventing biodiversity loss. The […]
Moderna, Inc., a biotechnology company working on messenger RNA (mRNA) therapeutics and vaccines, and Life Edit Therapeutics Inc., an ElevateBio company focused on gene editing technologies and therapeutics, have announced a strategic research and development collaboration to discover and develop in vivo mRNA gene editing therapies. The partnership will combine Life Edit’s suite of proprietary […]