Noubar Afeyan, Flagship CEO and Tessera chairman (Victor Boyko/Getty Images)

Flag­ship ex­ecs take a les­son from na­ture to mas­ter ‘gene writ­ing,’ launch­ing a star-stud­ded biotech with big am­bi­tions to cure dis­ease

Flag­ship Pi­o­neer­ing has opened up its deep pock­ets to fund a biotech up­start out to rev­o­lu­tion­ize the whole gene ther­a­py/gene edit­ing field — be­fore gene edit­ing has even made it to the mar­ket. And they’ve sur­round­ed them­selves with some mar­quee sci­en­tists and ex­ecs who have crowd­ed around to help shep­herd the tech­nol­o­gy ahead.

The lead play­er here is Flag­ship gen­er­al part­ner Ge­off von Maltzahn, an MIT-trained syn­thet­ic bi­ol­o­gist who set out in 2018 to do CRISPR — a wide­ly used gene edit­ing tool — and oth­er ri­val tech­nolo­gies one or two bet­ter. Von Maltzahn has been work­ing with Sana co-founder Jake Rubens, an­oth­er syn­thet­ic bi­ol­o­gy play­er out of MIT who he de­scribes as his “su­per­star,” who’s tak­en the CSO role.

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