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Editas Medicine Presents Data on New SLEEK Gene Editing Technology at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory’s Genome Engineering: CRISPR Frontiers Meeting
SLEEK enables high efficiency, multi-transgene knock-in of induced Pluripotent Stem Cells (iPSCs), T cells, and Natural Killer (NK) cells Data support SLEEK
About this update from Editas Medicine, Inc.
[{"type":"text","content":"SLEEK enables high efficiency, multi-transgene knock-in of induced Pluripotent Stem Cells (iPSCs), T cells, and Natural Killer (NK) cells Data support SLEEK as an optimized approach to develop next generation cell therapy medicines CAMBRIDGE, Mass., Aug. 20, 2021 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- Editas Medicine, Inc. (Nasdaq: EDIT), a leading genome editing company, today announced data on a new gene editing technology termed SLEEK (SeLection by Essential-gene Exon Knock-in). The Company reported these data in an oral presentation at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory’s Genome Engineering: CRISPR Frontiers meeting, being held virtually August 18-20, 2021. Despite major progress in achieving gene disruption, efficient knock-in of transgenes continues to be a significant challenge for the gene editing field. To solve this challenge, SLEEK was developed enabling high knock-in efficiencies with different transgenes while also ensuring robust, transgene expression. Editas Medicine believes that SLEEK may enable the development of next generation cell therapeutics for cancer and other serious diseases. New preclinical data demonstrated that SLEEK results in the knock-in of multiple clinically relevant transgenes through a proprietary process that selects for cells containing the knock-in cargo. In addition, high percentage knock-in efficiencies were enabled by Editas Medicine’s proprietary engineered AsCas12a nuclease. More than 90 percent knock-in efficiencies were observed in various clinically relevant target cells, including iPSCs, T cells, and NK cells. Additionally, SLEEK may be used to fine-tune the expression levels of transgene cargos, an important attribute of next-generation cell therapy medicines. “We find the new gene editing SLEEK technology to have immense potential, as it enables nearly 100 percent knock-in of functional transgene cargos at specific locations in the genome, which we believe to be the highest in the gene editing field across multiple cell types. We believe that this novel technology has broad applications and may result in substantially improved gene edited cell medicines, including for novel CAR-T and CAR-NK cell therapies,” said Mark S. Shearman, Ph.D., Executive Vice President and Chief Scientific Officer, Editas Medicine. “We believe SLEEK is an optimal approach to achieve highly efficient multi-transgene knock-in fo...