AstraZeneca to Harness Benefits of Genome-Editing Technology
By Marta Falconi (The Wall Street Journal) – ZURICH—British drug maker AstraZeneca PLC unveiled agreements on Thursday that should enable the pharmaceutical company to tap into a promising, nascent gene technology aimed at making drugs more precise.
AstraZeneca said it plans to make use of so-called CRISPR genome-editing technology for key therapeutic areas including oncology. The technology enables researchers to “edit” the genes of certain cells relatively quickly and accurately.
“CRISPR is a simple yet powerful tool that enables us to manipulate genes of potential importance in disease pathways and examine the impact of these modifications in a highly precise way,” said Mene Pangalos, the company’s head of innovative medicines and early development.
AstraZeneca said it hopes the technology will help it accelerate the discovery of new treatments, a process that normally takes years. The company will now collaborate on research using CRISPR technology with Britain’s Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute, the Calif.-based Innovative Genomics Initiative, the Broad Institute and Whitehead Institute in Massachusetts, and Thermo Fisher Scientific . No financial details of the agreements were disclosed.
CRISPR, or Clustered Regularly Interspaced Short Palindromic Repeats, came into the spotlight recently when Basel-based Novartis AG announced it had signed deals with U.S. biotechnology firms Intellia Therapeutics and Caribou Biosciences to gain access to the technology.
The technology has two components: A homing device to tap a specific section of DNA, and enzymatic “scissors” that cut DNA. By harnessing a cell’s own DNA-repair apparatus, the gene being targeted can be altered either by deleting it, or by turning its activity on or off. CRISPR is easier to handle in a laboratory than previous genome-editing techniques, AstraZeneca said.