Joining the CRISPR crowd
Why Atlas sees room for another CRISPR-Cas9 platform play in Intellia
Despite being the third CRISPR-Cas9 gene editing play to emerge in the past year, Intellia Therapeutics Inc. and investor Atlas Venture don't believe the company needs to play catch up. Indeed, the VC thinks there's plenty of room for multiple players in the field given the broad applicability of the technology.
Intellia came out of stealth mode last week, announcing a $15 million series A round led by Atlas and the Novartis Institutes for BioMedical Research (NIBR). Intellia has exclusive, worldwide rights to Caribou Biosciences Inc.'s CRISPR-Cas9 platform for therapeutic applications. CRISPR (clustered, regularly interspaced short palindromic repeats)-Cas9 (CRISPR-associated protein 9) is a bacterial defense system that is guided by DNA-RNA base pairing and can induce site-specific mutations...