Is Cas9 Really a CRISPR RNA Targeting Protein?

Please note: as of 6/30/22, ARK’s clients own greater than 1% of the shares outstanding of Beam Therapeutics Inc.

On today’s episode, ARK analyst Ali Urman hosts the inventors of the adenine base editor (ABE) and the cytosine base editor (CBE) Nicole Gaudelli and Alexis Komor, respectively. Nicole is the Senior Director and Head of Gene Editing Platform Technologies at Beam Therapeutics, and Alexis is an Assistant Professor of Chemistry and Biochemistry DNA damage and repair and Genome editing at the University of California, San Diego. Alexis and Nicole worked together to develop a pair of CRISPR base editors, capable of engineering precise single-base substitutions. In today’s conversation, Alexis and Nicole discuss their discovery of base editing, what base editing is, how they grew interested in the space and what the future applications of this discovery might be!

• Alexis and Nicole on the discovery of base editing
• What exactly base editing is
• How Alexis and Nicole grew interested in base editing
• Alexis’ interest in directed evolution
• How CRISPR and antibiotics integrate
• What itwas like working with Dr. David Liu
• The potential disease curing applications of base editing
• Why Alexis decided to go into academia rather than corporate
• Why Nicole decided to go into industry instead of academia