David Liu launches Beam Therapeutics to treat genetic diseases with CRISPR base editing
David Liu has been quietly building a company that will attempt to transform his base editing technique into therapies for numerous genetic diseases. That start-up, Beam Therapeutics, is launching with up to $87M in series A funding and with Feng Zhang and J. Keith Joung as cofounders.
Many CRISPR companies focus on using an enzyme called Cas9 to make specific cuts in DNA’s helical strands. But the technique can’t swap a single base, or letter—A, T, G, or C—of DNA for another. Through protein engineering, Liu and his students created new versions of CRISPR, called base editors, that do just that. According to one database, 33,000 single-letter DNA mutations are associated with disease. The four changes that Liu’s base editors can make could hypothetically correct 63% of them.
