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ARTICLE | Emerging Company Profile

Synbal: Gene driving on parallel tracks

How Synbal is gene-driving to new rodent models, rare disease cell therapies

March 8, 2019 8:56 PM UTC

Synbal is tapping new genetic approaches to develop both rodents with humanized metabolisms and cell therapies for lysosomal storage diseases.

Ethan Bier, Valentino Gantz and Tsvi Goldenberg spun out Synbal Inc. from the University of California San Diego in 2015 based on tech Bier and Gantz reported in two papers that year: one in Science demonstrating a single-step CRISPR-based gene drive system propagated homozygous changes in a population of fruit flies, and another in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences showing the system inserted a large self-propagating payload into mosquitoes to prevent the spread of malaria (see “Frequent Fly-er Program”)...