Benjamin Oakes' Scribe Therapeutics is developing specialized Crispr proteins for multiple diseases–and it’s got deals with Big Pharma potentially worth over $4 billion
with a stunning 94% of patients treated hitting the desired outcomes. The FDA is expected to make a decision on approval before the end of the year. Other Crispr-derived therapeutics for type one diabetes and multiple types of cancer are in the pipeline.
There’s a lot of activity in the Crispr startup market. According to Pitchbook, some $3.3 billion in venture capital has flowed into the space since 2019. That’s a figure that doesn’t even account for the over half-dozen Crispr companies that have exited to public markets in the past few years, or the hundreds of millions flowing in from big pharma.
“The group that has gone and built Scribe is really the next-generation team out of the Doudna Lab,” says Greg Yap, a partner at Menlo Ventures. He acknowledges the company has a long way to go before it brings products to market but says its partnerships with big pharma are an early validation of the tech’s promise.
The company emerged from stealth in October 2020, simultaneously announcing it had signed a drug development agreement with Biogen with a $15 million upfront payment and potentially worth up to $400 million if certain development milestones were met. The agreement also entitles Scribe to royalties from any approved drug that results.
Despite the big dollars it’s potentially seeing with these deals, the company is being selective in its partnerships, says chief business officer Svetlana Lucas.“I’ve seen companies that partnered a ton,” she says. “Which looks amazing at the time but then very impossible to execute on in the long-term.” The risk, she says, is losing focus and stretching resources too thin to execute on multiple programs at once.
This approach, says Oakes, is easier to scale without running into manufacturing bottlenecks that can plague other biological therapies — see how quickly the Covid vaccines were scaled up. That’s in part because the nanoparticles are much simpler to build than other gene therapy methods, which often rely on building complicated molecules like custom viruses to get medicines to the right place in the body.
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