Gene-editing startup Beam bags $135M in series B top-up

Beam Therapeutics has raised a healthy $135 million in second-round financing that will be used to advance its single-base approach to gene editing. The Cambridge, Massachusetts, biotech—which was one of our Fierce 15 winners last year—says the new funding will be used to expand its pipeline of development programs, refine its technology platforms and add to its headcount with additional “scientific and technical leadership.” Beam’s take on CRISPR is that its approach to the technology is more precise than other genome-editing techniques and can target just one base—A, G, C or T—out of billions. "Traditional" CRISPR-Cas9 editing cuts a whole gene to make a break in DNA or RNA, while the approach pioneered by one of Beam’s founder’s—David Liu, Ph.D., of Harvard University—directly converts a single base into another. The hope is that it will be able to modify sequences without the risk of unintended, off-target effects that some researchers suggest could be an issue for CRISPR as well as other technologies such as TALEN and zinc finger nucleases.