Editas Medicine, a company at the forefront of developing the gene-editing technology known as CRISPR, has raised $120 million to create new treatments for conditions including cancer, retinal disease, and sickle-cell anemia.
Monday’s announcement reflects a surge of interest in CRISPR, a technology that is only a few years old. It also serves to clarify the goals and strategy of Editas, which was founded by some of the most prominent inventors of the gene-editing system, including Feng Zhang, a researcher at the Broad Institute of Harvard and MIT. “We’re here to make medicines,” Katrine Bosley, Editas’s CEO, declared in an interview at the company’s offices in Cambridge, Massachusetts.
The new group of investors was led by Boris Nikolic, who was Bill Gates’s chief science and technology advisor at the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and is managing director of the investment company Bng0. Editas confirmed that Gates was also among the new investors, as are several other wealthy individuals whom the company declined to identify.
Editas, which had previously raised $43 million before this latest round, is one of several private biotechnology companies that have been amassing cash in order to create new types of treatments. Earlier this year, for instance, the biotechnology company Moderna Therapeutics raised $450 million. Juno Therapeutics—which is trying to treat cancers by genetically engineering T cells, a key part of the immune system—raised more than $300 million before going public this year.
Source: MIT Technology Review