Prime Medicine raises $315 million for search-and-replace gene editing

Abstract

Prime Medicine has raised $315 million to commercialize an invention from David Liu’s lab at Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard. The start-up is developing therapies based on a new class of CRISPR gene-editing tools called prime editors, which some scientists say could be the most versatile form of gene editing yet . Liu and his postdoc Andrew Anzalone quietly founded the firm in 2019 before publishing their work on prime editors that October ( Nature 2019, DOI: 10.1038/s41586-019-1711-4 ). The pandemic largely delayed Prime’s operations until the second half of 2020, CEO Keith Gottesdiener says. In the months since, Prime has grown to about 50 employees—most of them scientists—with plans to expand to about 100 by the end of 2021, he adds, buoyed by its newly disclosed $115 million series A and $200 million series B financings. The earliest versions of CRISPR gene editing relied on using the enzyme