A new startup co-founded by CRISPR innovator Feng Zhang, a former executive at Grail and Illumina, and others has raised $57 million to develop a defanged form of gene editing that doesn’t cut the DNA strand.
Moonwalk Therapeutics launched Thursday with funding from Alpha Wave Ventures, ARCH Venture Partners, Future Ventures, Khosla Ventures, GV, and YK Bioventures. It plans to use that money to develop treatments for a variety of diseases, including chronic and aging-related conditions, using what’s called epigenetic editing.
Most of the gene editing technologies being used today slice or nick the DNA strand and make permanent changes to the biological building blocks of genes. Moonwalk, however, plans to alter the activity of genes by focusing on chemical changes. The company is targeting the surrounding chemicals that influence how genes act. This can be done through chemical processes methylation, which turns genes on, or demethylation, which turns genes off.