Crispr Therapeutics, a Basel, Switzerland-based biopharmaceutical company that focuses on the gene-editing technology CRISPR-Cas9, raised $25m in Series A funding.
Versant Ventures made the investment.
The company intends to use the funds to translate its technology into important gene medicines.
Led by Dr Rodger Novak, CEO, Crispr Therapeutics aims to translate CRISPR-Cas9, a gene-editing technology, into medicines for serious human genetic diseases at the molecular level. The company has operations in London, UK. Cas9 is an enzyme that can be programmed with RNA to cut DNA at targeted sites within the genome,1-2 enabling the deletion, insertion or correction of target genes with surgical precision. It allows scientists and clinicians to mutate genes of interest and to correct specific target genes, to tackle both recessive and dominant genetic diseases.
CRISPR Therapeutics’ scientific founders are Dr Daniel Anderson, the Sam Goldblith Associate Professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Dr Emmanuelle Charpentier, a professor at the Helmholtz Centre for Infection Research and Hannover Medical School, Germany and the Laboratory for Molecular Infection Medicine at Umeå University, Sweden, Dr Chad Cowan, an associate professor at Harvard University in the Department of Stem Cell and Regenerative Biology, and at Massachusetts General Hospital, Dr Craig Mello, a Nobel prize-winning investigator at the Howard Hughes Medical Institute, the Blais University Chair in Molecular Medicine, and co-director of the RNA Therapeutics Institute at the University of Massachusetts Medical School, and Dr Matthew Porteus, an associate professor of pediatrics, Department of Pediatrics; Divisions of Hematology/Oncology and Human Gene Therapy, at Stanford School of Medicine.
FinSMEs
24/04/2014