Base-editor-focused Beam brings in more cash

Beam Therapeutics has raked in $135 million in its second formal financing round. Since launching in May 2018, the biotech firm has raised over $220 million to develop therapies that use base-editing technology from David R. Liu’s lab at Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard. These next-generation gene-editing tools allow researchers to make single-nucleotide base changes in DNA, an approach that could offer a fix for the swath of genetic diseases driven by an error in a single letter. Beam says it will use the funds to expand its team and move programs toward the clinic.