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!

Key Points From This Episode

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

Taken By Surprise – Joe Smith