Matthew Lauber’s Post

View profile for Matthew Lauber, graphic

Sr Director | Cell and Gene Tx | Chemistry

In case you missed the news late last year, Tome Biosciences has been making waves in the biotech space with more than $200 million in investments from major VCs. While those numbers are impressive, what’s driving that interest is more exciting: the use of #CRISPR technology to insert new genes in a process called programmable genomic integration (PGI). This new approach modifies the CRISPR process – which up until now has been primarily used to edit existing genes – and combines it with enzymes that can insert entirely new genetic code into DNA. This could give doctors and scientists far more control over genetic therapies and open the door for new treatments and even cures for genetically driven diseases. The basis of the PGI research comes from this fascinating paper in Nature Biotechnology: https://lnkd.in/ekqRGnBn Figure 1 shows the schematic of the novel Cas fusion protein that is enabling this new technology. The team behind this work wrote a paper about it two years ago and I’m eager to see what the Tome team does with that foundation as they move towards a commercial launch. Perhaps #HPLC chromatography and #lcms mass spectrometry will play a role in characterizing and performing release testing on future drug substances and products. #LifeatWaters #WatersInnovation

  • No alternative text description for this image
Ivan Lebedev, PhD

I make biological sciences approachable.

8mo

PGI can be a scary concept to an untrained individual. I like to approach the concept of genetic manipulation from the concept of a carrot. They used to be purple. Now they're orange. They taste the same.. Clustered regularly interspaced short palindromic repeats are no different. To me its just a big boy wording of "bacteria figured it out before us now we're trying to back-splain it."

To view or add a comment, sign in

Explore topics