STAT+: Feud between Prime and Tessera, two gene-editing companies, spills out into public

For several years, a rivalry has been brewing between two high-profile gene-editing companies. On one hand is Prime Medicine, built on prime editing, a technology out of David’s Liu lab at the Broad Institute for making small insertions, deletions, and single-letter changes to DNA. On the other is Tessera Therapeutics, a biotech launched by Flagship Pioneering, the VC behind Moderna, that has been, well, vague about precisely what it’s doing.  

Tessera launched claiming it could re-engineer mobile genetic elements — scraps of autonomous DNA or RNA that have been jumping around our genomes for eons — to make small and large changes to DNA. But when it started talking about its programs a couple years ago, the technology looked to some observers eerily similar to prime editing. 

Liu has all but publicly accused Tessera of copying his technology, but Prime’s leadership has largely stayed out of the fray — until late last week. At the annual meeting of the European Society of Cell and Gene Therapy conference in Rome, Prime’s chief scientist, Jeremy Duffield, was scheduled to present after Tessera. He walked on stage, the scientific publication GEN reported, and opened his talk by saying “It is great to follow Tessera, because we can see they’re doing prime editing!” 

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