Ben Oakes founded Scribe Therapeutics after identifying why CRISPR-Cas9 couldn't work inside the human body. During a 2017 fellowship at UC Berkeley, he and his team decided to build an entirely new genome-editing platform from scratch, searching for molecules with advantages Cas9 lacked.
Chapters
When I graduated in 2017 and I was awarded a fellowship at UC Berkeley to start my own lab, in particular this is the entrepreneurial fellowship at the Innovative Genomics Institute, we had to think a bit more pragmatically about the challenges that were facing us. And by us I mean, you know, the therapeutic or medical community writ large. CRISPR-Cas9 technology had advanced rapidly, of course, between the time I joined Jennifer's lab in early 2013 and 2017. But it was still really focused on engineering and editing cells in a dish. And what we actually did is we sat down, and I still remember this, we sat down in Dave's office in the Innovation Omics Institute on the second floor. Around this very small circular table that today would be very taboo, right? Just way too close to each other. And we had a whiteboard in front of us, and we literally wrote out what were the technical and pragmatic challenges that were facing CRISPR-Cas9 technology, and what we would need to build in order to enable what we envisioned to be the future of genetic medicine to be. And this future is very focused on treating the underlying cause of disease within the human body. So, we set out these really ambitious goals of basically building an entirely new and distinct genome editing system from scratch based on an entirely distinct foundation from Cas9. And we actually went out and we searched for a number of new, or through a number of these new genome editing modalities, genome editing molecules, to find one that had a number of really interesting and useful inherent advantages that could serve as this foundation. And we knew that if we could find that, that would be essentially the fertile ground that we could grow Scribe from.
