Acrigen Biosciences is developing technologies to improve the efficiency and enhance the safety of CRISPR-Cas based gene editing, with the aim of eliminating the threat of unintended editing causing severe complications and side effects.
The company’s technology is based on a class of proteins, anti-CRISPR or Acr proteins, that precisely deactivate the Cas proteins serving as a gene editing “off switch”. The company is co-founded by Professor Joseph Bondy-Denomy, currently at UCSF, who discovered Acr proteins.
Anti-CRISPR (Acr) proteins evolved alongside CRISPR systems to allow bacteriophages to inhibit bacterial immunity. Acrigen was founded to translate this technology into a platform for controlling CRISPR gene editing systems and to develop safe gene editing therapies.
The company says it has built a platform that can be used to discover, engineer, and apply Acr Technology to control any CRISPR gene editing system. Using its proprietary AcrTAIN™ bioinformatics Acr discovery software the company is identifying novel CRISPR control proteins which can be tailored for specific applications.
Acrigen is aiming to build a pipeline of therapeutic products against a broad range of genetic disorders.
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