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Caribou Biosciences, one of the biotech startups working to advance a much-watched new technology for precise gene editing, announced today it has raised an $11 million Series A round from venture capital firms and Swiss drug giant Novartis.
The money will help Berkeley, CA-based Caribou speed up its efforts to adapt a versatile genome editing technique co-discovered by one of its founders, UC Berkeley professor Jennifer Doudna, for a range of uses, including drug research and development, and industrial technology.
Doudna (pictured above) and her collaborator, Emmanuelle Charpentier of the Helmholtz Center for Infection Research in Braunschweig, Germany, and Umeå University in Sweden, figured out how to transform a bacterial defense against viral infection into a tool to edit out abnormal sections of genes, such as those that cause hereditary diseases.
Caribou’s gene editing platform is based on two elements of that bacterial molecular machinery: a guiding mechanism called CRISPR (clustered, regularly interspaced palindromic repeats), and an enzyme called Cas9, or CRISPR-associated protein 9, molecular scissors that cut a segment of DNA. Caribou was founded in...