| Timing is perfect on this. We are fortunate enough to be witnessing Year One in the Age of Crispr ;) For those brainstorming startup ideas some relatively recently funded companies include: eGenesis - Dr. George Church's company that uses edited porcine stem lines for human xenotransplantation Twist Bio - synthetic bio for applications ranging from novel materials to data storage Denali - focus on age related neurodegenerative disorders such as Parkinson’s and Alzheimer’s Benchling - molecular bio and gene editing design software Synthego - free gene knockout kits But of all the breakthroughs last year. The one that may be most impactful. Editing human genes in the embryo to remove hereditary disease. Correction of a pathogenic gene mutation in human embryos https://www.nature.com/articles/nature23305 |
Tech investors are almost totally unequiped to do the necessary DD. They either therefore go for plays that are easy to understand, largely computational exercises or in the rare cases they do go for something higher risk, they back something crazy (e.g. Theranos) because they don’t do good DD.
Getting an “expert” to vet the play rarely works. Because tech VCs don’t know how to choose good experts.
So most of (all?) these plays will ultimately fail. It won’t matter much to seed round investors though, because they’ll take 10 years to fail and they will likely have at least partially exited by then...