Scribe Raises $100 Million to Further Develop Its “CRISPR by Design” Platform

Rare Daily Staff

Scribe Therapeutics completed an oversubscribed $100 million series B financing to continue developing its “CRISPR by Design” platform and its pipeline of genetic medicines.

Avoro Ventures and Avoro Capital Advisors led the financing joined by OrbiMed Advisors and Andreessen Horowitz. Perceptive Advisors, funds and accounts advised by T. Rowe Price Associates, funds managed by Wellington Management, RA Capital Management, Menlo Ventures, and an undisclosed global investment firm also joined the syndicate. As part of the financing, Behzad Aghazadeh, managing partner at Avoro Ventures and Avoro Capital Advisors, and Carl Gordon, managing partner at OrbiMed Advisors, will join Scribe’s Board of Directors.

Scribe will use the funding to further develop its suite of custom gene editing and delivery technologies, as well as to advance a pipeline of therapeutics for neurodegeneration and additional diseases with high unmet need.

“Scribe’s engineering-first philosophy has resulted in a uniquely flexible platform for imagining and creating a new era of CRISPR-based therapies to elevate the standard of care for thousands of patients,” said Jennifer Doudna, co-inventor of CRISPR technology, Nobel Laureate, and co-founder of Scribe Therapeutics.

Founded to address the issues of safety, delivery, poor editing outcomes, and an uncertain intellectual property landscape that limit current CRISPR technologies, Scribe’s evergreen engineering platform creates custom molecules specifically designed for therapeutic use within the human body. The company’s expertise and track record in CRISPR and protein engineering have allowed it to hone its fully integrated and proprietary CRISPR technologies for efficacy, specificity, and deliverability.

“We are building a future where treating the underlying causes of disease will be achieved by best-in-class, custom engineered technologies,” said Benjamin Oakes, CEO and co-founder of Scribe Therapeutics. “With molecular engineering at our core, we aim to move beyond discovery towards scalable biological design that can precisely address previously intractable genetic maladies.”

To date, Scribe has engineered CRISPR enzymes found in nature into millions of novel variants with ideal therapeutic attributes to enable highly effective and specific in vivo applications. The company continues to engineer additional technologies as part of its continually expanding integrated platform while developing its pipeline to target various areas of unmet need.

Additionally, under a research collaboration with Biogen signed six months ago, Scribe is developing CRISPR-based therapies that address the underlying causes of amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS), a progressive neurodegenerative disease that affects nerve cells in the brain and the spinal cord and eventually leads to the death of motor neurons and loss of the ability of the brain to initiate and control muscle movement. With muscle action progressively affected, patients in the later stages of the disease may become paralyzed and unable to breathe normally.

“Scribe’s engineering approach has revolutionized industry expectations for blueprinting and creating CRISPR-based therapies,” said Vijay Pande, general partner at Andreessen Horowitz. “By accelerating the shift from an artisanal discovery approach to a fully industrialized one, the company is poised to fundamentally transform how we treat and manage genetic diseases at scale.”

Photo: Jennifer Doudna, co-inventor of CRISPR technology, Nobel Laureate, and co-founder of Scribe Therapeutics