entertainment

The closely watched gene-editing startup Prime Medicine is embroiled in a multimillion-dollar dispute with another biotech it partnered with to develop a potentially powerful new form of genome editing.

Prime and Myeloid Therapeutics, a startup co-founded by Pulitzer Prize-winning writer and cancer biologist Siddhartha Mukherjee, have filed competing arbitration claims over a deal they signed in March 2022.

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Prime, spun out of the lab of Broad Institute biochemist David Liu, was built on technology for making small insertions, deletions, and single-letter changes in DNA. In theory, prime editing allows researchers to tackle the vast majority of disease-causing mutations, and the first treatments are already being readied for clinical trials. But it’s a poor fit in cases where hundreds or even thousands of different mutations in a long gene cause the same diseases, such as cystic fibrosis or Duchenne muscular dystrophy.

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