Massachusetts-based Editas Medicine, founded in November 2013 with $43 million, has just raised $120 million to help develop CRISPR-Cas9, a DNA-editing technology yet to be tried in patients, and keep the company running for a projected three years. The funding is designed to study and test CRISPR-Cas9 to treat potentially deadly diseases including cancer, retinal disease, and sickle-cell anemia by replacing the faulty genes with a healthy one.
The lead investor in the fundraising was Boris Nikolic, managing director of Bng0; he is the former chief scientific adviser to Bill Gates at the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. Gates, Google Ventures, Fidelity, Deerfield Management and T Rowe Price are part of a galaxy of investors supporting the futuristic innovation.
“They all appreciate the vast potential of this science. The heart of the conversation we had with everybody is how you translate this very exciting but young science into treatments, into therapies,” Katrine Bosley, Editas CEO, told Forbes.
While other firms are already using CRISPR-Cas9 to try and discover new drugs, Editas is focused on gene therapy, on using viruses or other methods to deliver the CRISPR-Cas9 protein into the cells of sick patients and edit the very DNA that is making them ill, she insisted.
What makes venture capitalists from Silicon Valley, especially Bill Gates, a known eugenicist, and the scientists from healthcare sector join hands to support a controversial technology? If CRISPR-Cas9 is cheap and easy to use technology, why is so much cash being pumped into ‘researching’ and testing it by the ‘investors’?
The reality is even if the breakthrough technology starts yielding fruits in future, it will only help patients with money and not an average human being. How else do you offer the investors a payoff on their investment?
When the Rolling Stone asked Bill Gates, a known eugenicist, about breakthrough medical technologies in a March 2014 interview, Gates replied that “innovation can actually be your enemy in health care if you are not careful” because “If you accelerate certain things but aren’t careful about whether you want to make those innovations available to everyone, then you’re intensifying the cost in such a way that you’ll overwhelm all the resources.” This is what he meant – not everyone can and should have access to beneficial “health care innovations” and we need to be “careful” that not just anyone can access them.
For your information, there are a handful of competing start-ups that have raise huge funds recently. In April 2015, CRISPR Therapeutics raised $64 million from investors including Celgene, a prolific investor in biotech groups, and the venture capital arm of GlaxoSmithKline. Intellia Therapeutics raised $15 million in 2014 before signing a collaboration with Novartis in January 2015. Caribou Biosciences of Berkeley too is part of the fray having recently raised an $11 million of its own.
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i do support active death help, but only if the person do agree, either on a paper or since we have technology to read our minds, then hook them up and ask them some questions and see if they are able to answer correct then ask the final question, if the person sends signals that represent no, then we have to respect the person we asked and not the family or government. i felt sad for my grandfather bc he starved in 14 days and was 92 yrs old, and i wanted to help him, but the law prevented it. But now they promote killing in the media, and even try to manipulate ppl to take lives that doesn’t matter……. that’s the biggest joke! suddenly it’s okay and moral correct to kill those who are sick, even if we don’t actually know if they want to live or not. I live in Denmark, but we are just 5 yrs behind USA. to be honest, USA are more like an experiment and then it spread like a virus. if they promote this and all the benefits goes to the rich, then it will come to Europa and Asia. it’s sick how we see the world and life itself
wtf did she say bill gates is secretly evil? He donates almost all of his profits to charity and this is the shit he takes. get fucked.
All the money that goes to charities with it i havent seen any actual difference made it all goes back to the shit it was, our world has a population problem and people in higher places want it reduced so they can live fulfilled life as long as they can. A perfect society can only work with small amount of people because otherwise there are too many people with too many ideals that conflict one another.
Now, if he donates almost all his profit to charity (we ALL know how rich B.Gates is) and YOU dont see any actual difference…did you ever wonder how the world would look like atm if he didnt do so?