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Novartis to use CRISPR technology platforms for new medicines

Swiss pharmaceutical firm Novartis has signed collaboration and licensing agreements with Intellia Therapeutics and Caribou Biosciences to develop new medicines and drug discovery tools with CRISPR genome editing technology.

Novartis

With these collaborations, Novartis will now have access to new CRISPR technology platforms for the discovery and development of new medicines.

A clustered regularly interspaced short palindromic repeats (CRISPR) is an approach that allows scientists to easily and precisely edit the genes of targeted cells.

Novartis Institutes for BioMedical Research (NIBR) president Mark Fishman said: "We have glimpsed the power of CRISPR tools in our scientific programs in NIBR, and it is now time to explore how to safely extend this powerful technology to the clinic.

"CRISPR has the potential to open a new branch of medicine, editing the genome to cure disease.

"Much remains to be learned, and we are delighted to explore these directions with colleagues from Intellia and Caribou."

The deal with Intellia will help in exploring therapeutic options for using CRISPR technology to engineer chimeric antigen receptor T-cells and hematopoietic stem cells, while collaboration with Caribou will focus on using this technology as a research tool for drug discovery.


Image: Novartis headquarters in Basel Switzerland. Photo: courtesy of Andrew.