A multi-faceted partnership to advance the future of genomic medicine

Recent news has broadcast exciting innovations for CRISPR therapeutics. But what makes CRISPR so powerful? This technology is able to target very specific sites in the genome and instigate changes based on its “programming” of guide RNA. The potential impact on humanity is significant. A huge range of genetic diseases could potentially be treated with basic CRISPR machinery paired with mutation-specific guide RNAs.  

I am extremely proud to be leading the new, collaborative partnership between Integrated DNA Technologies’ (IDT) parent company, Danaher Corporation, and the Innovative Genomics Institute. The Danaher-IGI Beacon for CRISPR Cures combines resources and expertise from both organizations to harness the power of CRISPR-based gene editing and accelerate the development therapies for genetic diseases. 

Even though I moved to IDT from academia about eight years ago, I feel like I never truly left, as our research group has a strong academic mindset. Our work, particularly in new product development, is very R&D-heavy and we remain close to academics studying CRISPR through various collaborations.  

These defined partnerships between industry and academia are crucial to speed the rate of innovation and validate our novel products. In industry, we’ve honed methodologies and have hardware and tools that are not always accessible to academics. Similarly, academics provide those in industry with important feedback and an understanding of customer needs.

For our Beacon Initiative, Danaher’s operating companies, including IDT, provide reagents, equipment, analytics, and other needed means for research, while IGI provides the know-how, the experience, and the authority to work with patients directly. This teamwork will allow us to create products and solutions that are bigger than the sum of their individual parts. 

The goal is to develop methods for assessing the efficacy and safety of CRISPR-based therapies to enable a standardized platform so the same basic approach could be recapitulated across many diseases. We would then work with the FDA to ensure that the approach is safe, meaning that we could help parallel-track and speed clinical development for CRISPR to address a range of disease-causing mutations. 

This project opens the door to creating a new common regulatory framework with the FDA, which is one of the major goals of this new collaborative project with the IGI. I’m excited and honored to be a part of this and to watch the brightest minds in gene editing develop therapies redefine how we treat diseases and change patients’ lives for the better.