Eye­ing Duchenne MD cure, The Col­umn Group gam­bles $40M on CRISPR/Cas9 start­up Ex­on­ics

The Col­umn Group thinks that gene edit­ing may pro­vide just the right kind of tech­nol­o­gy need­ed to cure Duchenne mus­cu­lar dy­s­tro­phy. And the in­vest­ment group is wa­ger­ing $40 mil­lion that the pre­clin­i­cal mouse da­ta used to back biotech start­up Ex­on­ics is point­ing in the right di­rec­tion.

This in­fu­sion of cash is a big boost for Ex­on­ics, a Cam­bridge, MA-based com­pa­ny which start­ed out with $5 mil­lion in seed mon­ey from Cure­Duchenne. But their back­ers in San Fran­cis­co are not just hand­ing the funds off, Ex­on­ics CEO John Rip­ple told End­points News. In ad­di­tion to bankrolling the pre­clin­i­cal re­search (much of which will be op­ti­miz­ing the cur­rent tech­nol­o­gy), it will al­so be piv­otal in ex­pan­sion ef­forts as Ex­on­ics looks to start a lab in Cam­bridge to sup­ple­ment founder Er­ic Ol­son’s re­search at UT South­west­ern.

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