Editas Medicine said Tuesday it will license out or partner its lead sickle cell treatment, the latest shift for a tarantella company that has repeatedly switched direction and leadership since first emerging as one of the first CRISPR biotechs a decade ago.
Editas will now focus on a different, newly announced sickle cell program. Like the two sickle cell gene therapies approved last year, Editas’ old program, Reni-Cel, required extracting a patient’s blood cells, editing them at a large facility, and then reinfusing — an expensive and difficult-to-scale process that requires patients to undergo intensive chemotherapy.
The new effort involves editing a patient’s cells while they’re in the body, eliminating the need for expensive manufacturing or the high-dose chemotherapy. If successful, such a treatment could be both more attractive to sickle cell patients in the U.S. and Europe and more easily scaled to the rest of the world, where most sickle cell patients live.
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