Meet the 30 young leaders forging a new future for the healthcare industry in 2021
Benjamin Oakes is carving out a space in the gene-editing field by developing what he calls a “genetic scalpel.”
After researching gene editing in the labs of CRISPR pioneer Jennifer Doudna and UC Berkeley biochemist David Savage, Oakes and a fellow lab researcher, Brett Staahl, founded Scribe Therapeutics in 2018 alongside Dounda and Savage.
Oakes, Scribe’s CEO, said he had a strategy that could allow gene editing to reach more targets and use smaller doses. It’s different from the standard approach to gene editing that uses the Cas9 enzyme, the protein responsible for sparking the chemical reaction that allows CRISPR to cut and paste genetic material inside cells.
This system, which Doudna and others discovered in 2012, comes from a survival trick that bacteria use to remember and destroy invading viruses.
