In our recent article on DNA nanotechnology, we looked at a paper co-authored by George Church that refers to the “staggering” progress being made in gene editing. While it used to be that gene editing seemed to be synonymous with the acronym CRISPR, that’s not the case. CRISPR is just one of many methods one can use to edit genes. About one year ago to date, we wrote an article about “A Few Updates on the Progress of Gene Editing” which touched on a highly contested intellectual property battle that’s been taking place in gene editing. In that same article, we talked about a – now publicly traded – firm called Homology Medicines (FIXX) which believes that current approaches like CRISPR and TALENs, suffer from the following limitations:
- Unwanted on- and off-target DNA modifications.
- Inability to efficiently and precisely introduce entire gene to the genome.
- Complexity of vector delivery and manufacturing to achieve gene insertion
They’re not the only ones that think popular methods may not be the way forward. Another firm called Precision BioSciences has developed their own uni