For Yale scientists Peter Glazer, Mark Saltzman and Marie Egan, September was a memorable month. Trucode Gene Repair, the biotech company they advised, received $34 million in venture funding.
The funding bolsters the Bay Area
For Yale scientists Peter Glazer, Mark Saltzman and Marie Egan, September was a memorable month. Trucode Gene Repair, the biotech company they advised, received $34 million in venture funding.
The funding bolsters the Bay Area biotech company’s development of a novel gene-editing technology. Unlike other methods, their approach uses a nanoparticle gene-editing molecule that allows researchers to change DNA without removing any cells from an organism. Eventually, the scientists at Trucode hope that the technology will be used for incurable diseases such as cystic fibrosis and sickle cell disease.
“For diseases like cystic fibrosis — which affects the lung and the gut — you can’t take out the lung and the gut to edit genes outside the body,” Saltzman said. “To treat cystic fibrosis using gene therapy, we need to use in vivo approaches to do it within the body, and that’s where [our technology] can come in to address complicated problems like this.”
The technology has its roots at Yale, where in 2009, Saltzman and Glazer began collaborating on a new method of therapeutic gene editing. T