Seamless Therapeutics has launched with €11.8 million (roughly $12.5 million) in seed funding to build out a gene editing platform.

As more and more gene editing techniques are being developed — starting with CRISPR/Cas9 to base and prime editing, and more recently, PASTE — Seamless is trying to evolve, literally, an approach that dates back decades.

The Dresden, Germany-based startup is developing so-called “designer recombinases” that can potentially edit large chunks of genes. Recombinases are enzymes that can excise, invert, or even insert a DNA sequence, but typically they only work via very specific target sequences. However, by continuously evolving these recombinases, Seamless is trying to develop recombinases that work at the sequences it wants — those that are found in human genes.

A proxy fight is brewing at Illumina as activist investor Carl Icahn argues that the DNA sequencing giant is costing shareholders billions by following through with its Grail purchase amid antirust challenges.

In a letter to Illumina shareholders on Monday morning, Icahn stated that $50 billion of value has been wiped from the company’s market capitalization since August 2021.

“This value destruction is a direct result of a series of ill-advised (and frankly inexplicable) actions taken by the board of directors of our company in connection with the acquisition of GRAIL, Inc.,” Icahn wrote. “To paraphrase William Shakespeare’s Hamlet, something is rotten in the state of Illumina.”

The behemoth biotech creator Flagship Pioneering is out with another startup aiming to achieve the crown jewel of drug development: treatments that hit only the desired target and cause no unwanted effects elsewhere.

Ampersand Biomedicines is the Boston incubator’s latest biotech to open its blinds, with Flagship dishing out a $50 million check to bankroll initial work.

Leading the charge at Ampersand is Flagship general partner Avak Kahvejian, who’s also founding CEO of ProFound Therapeutics and has been involved in the early days of multiple other companies formed by the engine that sparked Moderna.