University of California CRISPR researchers form drug discovery alliance with pharma giant
Top CRISPR researchers at two University of California (UC) campuses have teamed up with pharmaceutical giant GlaxoSmithKline (GSK) to form a new laboratory in San Francisco that will exploit the genome editor to screen for new drugs.
Drawing on a GSK commitment of $67 million over 5 years, UC Berkeley’s Jennifer Doudna, a co-inventor of the powerful CRISPR tool, and UC San Francisco’s Jonathan Weissman will select the academic talent to work in the new Laboratory for Genomics Research (LGR). “This is really, for us as academics, kind of a dream come true,” Doudna says.
Although Doudna has already co-founded two CRISPR-related companies and co-runs the Innovative Genomics Institute with Weissman, she says the LGR “takes the not very interesting parts of the screening efforts out of the picture.” A friend who visited her lab a few years ago described it as “artisanal,” she recalls and wondered why they weren’t using more automation. “It was a nice way of saying that it seems really fusty,” Doudna says. She hopes the LGR will allow them to use “genome editing and CRISPR, in particular, as a tool to understand the causes of disease in a way that had really never been possible in the past.”
