ABLC Preview – The Top 10 Industry Trends to Follow

TOOLS

The news: Earlier this fall, we reported that Massachusetts-based Ginkgo Bioworks, referred to as “the organism company,” that is using advanced biotechnology to grow products instead of manufacturing them, got a Series E financing round of $290 million bringing the company’s total funding to $719 million. You got that right, $719 million total. This will help Ginkgo accelerate widespread adoption of synthetic biology, including new partnerships with startup accelerators Y Combinator and Petri. Even better, in a Digest exclusive interview, we have the latest on their key milestones this year as well as insight on Ginkgo’s long-term plans and vision.

The news: This week reports surfaced that a team from the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard has developed a new CRISPR genome-editing approach by combining two of the most important proteins in molecular biology — CRISPR-Cas9 and a reverse transcriptase — into a single machine.

The system, called “prime editing,” is capable of directly editing human cells in a precise, efficient, and highly versatile fashion. The approach expands the scope of gene editing for biological and therapeutics research, and has the potential to correct up to 89 percent of known disease-causing genetic variations.

Prime editing differs from previous genome-editing systems in that it uses RNA to direct the insertion of new DNA sequences in human cells. The first CRISPR tool harnessed for genome editing in human cells, pioneered at the Broad Institute, MIT, and Harvard, was the Cas9 protein. Cas9 makes nearby breaks on each DNA strand, cutting the DNA entirely. These tools can disrupt target genes at a specific location and then make it possible to add new sequences through recombination of new DNA into the site, directed by the cell itself.

Why significant and what’s next: The CRISPR news reminds us that we are just at the beginning of the gene editing story. The story for the next 5 years is going to be less about discoveries and more about tools.