Three of the creators of the biotech startup scene in Boston announced a special consortium to invest in a new startup named Editas Medicine. According to a report by Xconomy, Polaris Partners, Third Rock Ventures, and Flagship Ventures, with Partners Innovation Fund had placed a USD43 million Series A investment in the Cambridge, Massachussetts-based startup.
The investment was sizeable as the aim of the startup is ambitious. Evitas intends to make a new batch of drugs based on gene editing. Editas wanted to address disorders caused by certain genetic defect through the new medicine. The startup, said the report, would be using a proprietary in-house technology in order to develop drugs that would edit out the gene abnormality in one single treatment.
Polaris' partner and Editas Chief Executive Officer Kevin Bitterman said about the startup's aim, "I would think of this as really the potential for a whole new class of therapeutics. We can go in and, without really any limitation since it's a programmable system-we can target any gene in the genome and theoretically fix a mistake, remove a gene, or modulate expression in a very targeted way."
Although the startup had been operating discreetly, it has no plans to reveal its secrets on the potential product's real-world applications. Bitterman also did not disclose specifics about the type of diseases the startup would be seeking to look for a potential cure, what portion of the Series A funding the startup has access to, or what intellectual property type the startup intends to uphold for protection from possible competitors.
However, Xconomy said Editas' work had been based on five of the most high-profile researchers. These are Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard's Feng Zhang, Howard Hughes Medical Institute investigators Jennifer Doudna and David Liu, Harvard University genomics expert George Church and Massachusetts General Hospital and Harvard professor Keith Joung.
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