An­oth­er epigenome edit­ing start­up launch­es from a pair of the field’s long­time lead­ers

A lit­tle un­der 20 years ago, Char­lie Gers­bach de­cid­ed he need­ed to try some­thing else.

The young Geor­gia Tech grad stu­dent start­ed out his ca­reer hop­ing to help pa­tients re­gen­er­ate in­jured tis­sues, but he found pret­ty much noth­ing worked. None of the chem­i­cal or me­chan­i­cal or even elec­tric in­ter­ven­tions then in vogue yield­ed much suc­cess.

So he turned his at­ten­tion to an emerg­ing ap­proach: chang­ing the epigenome, or the sys­tems of tags and folds on DNA that gov­ern which genes are ex­pressed and how. And he stuck to it, even as many sci­en­tists, en­ticed by CRISPR and oth­er ad­vances, flocked to genome edit­ing.

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