Broad Licenses Gene-Editing Technology

Editas Medicine has set up an exclusive licensing agreement around genome-editing technology with Harvard University and the Broad Institute of MIT & Harvard. Editas intends to use targeted gene-modification techniques to find disease therapies. It will focus on clustered, regularly interspaced, short, palindromic repeats (CRISPR) and CRISPR-associated protein 9 (Cas9), along with transcription-activator-like effector nucleases, or TALENs, to directly turn on, turn off, or edit disease-causing genes. Separately, the Broad Institute has licensed the CRISPR/Cas9 technology to Sigma-Aldrich, which will make, use, and sell gene-editing tools for research applications.