SAN FRANCISCO — Eleven years ago, Editas launched as the first company built around the nascent gene editing technology CRISPR. Founded by Feng Zhang, George Church and others and backed by Flagship and Third Rock, it promised to unleash the tool on all manner of human malady. “We have in our crosshairs any diseases with a genetic component,” interim CEO Kevin Bitterman said in 2013.
Today, Editas is the only one of the original three CRISPR companies without any medicines in clinical trials. Its first program, in a rare eye disease, failed in 2022 after extensive delays. And in December, it shelved a sickle cell treatment similar to Casgevy, the treatment approved in late 2023 from Vertex and CRISPR Therapeutics. Casgevy’s slow rollout — it appears to have reached only two patients in 2024 — discouraged investors, CEO Gilmore O’Neill acknowledged in an interview Tuesday.
O’Neill and chief scientist Linda Burkly were here, at the JP Morgan Healthcare Conference, to sell investors and partners on a new vision of Editas they believe can compete in a gene editing field the biotech was once supposed to dominate. Only occasionally did they hint at prior dysfunction.
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