Editas Medicine, a transformative genome editing company, today announced it has secured a $43m Series A financing led by Flagship Ventures, Polaris Partners and Third Rock Ventures with participation from Partners Innovation Fund.
Following an explosion of high profile publications on CRISPR/Cas9 and TALENs, genome editing has emerged as one of the most exciting new areas of scientific research.
These recent advances have made it possible to modify, in a targeted way, almost any gene in the human body with the ability to directly turn on, turn off or edit disease-causing genes.
Editas' mission is to translate its genome editing technology into a novel class of human therapeutics that enable precise and corrective molecular modification to treat the underlying cause of a broad range of diseases at the genetic level.
Editas Medicine interim president Dr Kevin Bitterman and Polaris Partners principal nmoted Editas is exclusively positioned to leverage the very latest in genome editing to develop life-changing medicines for patients.
"Our suite of foundational intellectual property, combined with the proprietary know-how of our founding team and our financial resources, will enable us to rapidly translate these groundbreaking discoveries into important medicines," Dr Bitterman added.
The company has generated substantial patent filings and has access to intellectual property covering foundational genome editing technologies, as well as essential advancements and enablements that will uniquely allow the company to translate early findings into viable human therapeutic products.
CRISPR (clustered, regularly interspaced short palindromic repeats)/Cas9 (CRISPR-associated protein 9) and TALENs (transcription activator-like effector nucleases) comprise novel gene editing methods that overcome the challenges associated with previous technologies.
Early published research on CRISPR/Cas9, coupled with a growing body of work on TALENs, suggests the potential to pursue therapeutic indications that have previously been intractable to traditional gene therapy, gene knock-down or other genome modification techniques.
The CRISPR/Cas9 system, the most recent and exciting approach to emerge, acts by a mechanism in which the Cas9 protein binds to specific RNA molecules. The RNA molecules then guide the Cas9 complex to the exact location in the genome that requires repair.
CRISPR/Cas9 uniquely enables highly efficient knock-out, knock-down or selective editing of defective genes in the context of their natural promoters, unlocking the ability to treat the root cause of a broad range of diseases.