[LINK] "Crispr Gene-Editing Upstart Editas Goes Public as Patent Battle Rages"

[rfmcdonald]

Wired's Julia Greenberg looks at the legal fight over Crispr, the first modern genetic engineering technology for beings like us (potentially).

The future of medicine may rest in altering our genes. That’s a constant refrain in the recent history of medical science. Over the past few decades, researchers and investors have pinned their hopes on experimental gene therapies with the potential to change the landscape of disease, from transplanting engineered stem cells into humans to injecting them with viruses. The most recent addition to the list: Crispr-Cas9, a powerful gene-editing technique that allows researchers to rapidly—and cheaply—cut-and-paste genes.

Crispr is still a long way from snipping disease-causing mutations from the cells of humans. Right now, it’s most successful as a experimental tool, editing the genomes of yeast cells and a worm here and there. But that’s not stopping a number of biotech companies from capitalizing on the technology: Crispr Therapeutics, Caribou Biosciences (and spinoff Intellia Therapeutics), and Editas Medicine all hope to use the technique to develop human therapeutics. And yesterday, Editas became the first to go public.

Backed by Bill Gates and GV (venture capital arm of Alphabet, Google’s parent company), Editas filed for an initial public offering in January, and began trading on the NASDAQ exchange at $16 per share. It sold 5.9 million shares, raising $94.4—and the stock rose nearly 14 percent yesterday, its first day of trading.

Despite that successful opening, the company has a long way to go. Editas promises to do a lot with science that’s still in its infancy. Founded in 2013, Editas probably won’t begin clinical trials for at least a few years, even as scientists and ethicists negotiate the rules for fundamentally changing someone’s genes. More crucially, though, its ability to develop drugs rests on the results of a weedy ongoing patent dispute over the Crispr technology. “There’s a graveyard full of gene-editing biotech companies that have gone public that are no longer with us,” says Jacob Sherkow, an associate professor at New York Law School who has written about the Crispr-Cas9 patent dispute.