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Evogene Announces Participation in the Second Research Period of the CRISPR-IL Consortium
Israeli Innovation Authority to continue funding the on-going development of an end-to-end artificial intelligence system for genome-editing REHOVOT, Israel,
About this update from Evogene Ltd.
[{"type":"text","content":"Israeli Innovation Authority to continue funding the on-going development of an end-to-end artificial intelligence system for genome-editing\n\n\nREHOVOT, Israel, Nov. 10, 2021 /PRNewswire/ -- Evogene Ltd. (NASDAQ: EVGN) (TASE: EVGN), a leading computational biology company targeting to revolutionize life-science product development across several market segments, announced today that it has been informed by the Israeli Innovation Authority (IIA) of the IIA's decision to fund a second 18-month period of the CRISPR-IL consortium established last year. The consortium's mission is to develop and validate an end-to-end artificial intelligence system - \"Go-Genome\" - for genome-editing in multi-species for applications in pharma, agriculture, and aquaculture. \n \n \nThe CRISPR-IL consortium was initially approved by the Israeli Innovation Authority for a period of 18 months with total budget of approximately ILS 40 million. This current approval, based on the achievements of the consortium to date, is for a second 18-month period and an additional budget of approximately ILS 45 million (roughly $14.4 million), partially funded by a grant from the IIA. CRISPR-IL participants include leading Israeli companies, medical institutions, and academic institutions. Dr. Eyal Emanuel, Evogene's VP New Directions, continues to serve as Chairman of the CRISPR-IL consortium. \nThe first period of research was devoted to successfully developing an initial version of \"Go-Genome\", an end-to-end genome editing supporting platform, encompassing diverse editing datasets aimed at improving editing efficiency. \"Go-Genome\" then enabled the design of thousands of gRNAs[1], performed thousands of successful editing experiments in different cells and analyzed the outcoming data. Such experiments included editing of hundreds of genetic targets across a variety of organisms in the fields of pharma (human) and agriculture (plants & animals). \nDuring the second period of research, the consortium aims to improve \"Go-Genome's\" learning models with respect to editing efficiency with a strong focus on genome-editing specificity, indicating editing exclusively on the intended target. \"Go-Genome\"'s computational learning models are expected to be trained[2] and validated by hundreds of genome-editing experiments, conducted by the consortium participants. The...