Seasoned Industry Leader to Focus on Genome Editing Platform Development and Expansion
CAMBRIDGE, Mass.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Editas Medicine, a leading genome editing company, today announced the appointment of Vic Myer, Ph.D., as chief technology officer. Dr. Myer brings to Editas extensive experience in leading pharmaceutical and technology research and development, information technology and business development.
"Vic is a proven leader and brings a depth of scientific expertise that will be critical to continuing to expand the Editas platform," said Katrine Bosley, CEO, Editas. "He understands how to translate exciting science into robust, scalable systems that can be applied to many different kinds of biological targets across many kinds of diseases, which is what we hope to do here at Editas. We're glad to have him on the team."
Prior to joining Editas, Dr. Myer served as executive director and Cambridge site head for the Developmental and Molecular Pathways (DMP) department at the Novartis Institutes for Biomedical Research Incorporated (NIBR). While at Novartis, he led a global team of more than 200 scientists engaged in both drug discovery and technology platform roles. Dr. Myer joined Novartis in 2004 as a research investigator and advanced over the course of this tenure there, including leading the high throughput biology team and overseeing the target discovery technologies platform. Previous to Novartis, Dr. Myer was a founding scientist and group leader at Akceli, Inc., a venture-backed systems-biology company focusing on commercialization of a high-throughput cell-based micro-array technology. Dr. Myer also served as senior scientist for Millennium Pharmaceuticals and held various roles at Corning, Inc.
Dr. Myer received his B.S. in biology (biochemistry) from Cornell University and his Ph.D. in molecular biophysics and biochemistry from Yale University. He was a postdoctoral research associate at the Whitehead Institute for Biomedical Research at Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
"Genome editing is an incredibly exciting and rapidly unfolding field, and I believe it has the potential to change the landscape of medicine as we know it," said Dr. Myer. "I am pleased to be joining the Editas team and am committed to developing our technology in a deep and very broad way in order to apply it to as many genetically driven diseases as possible."
About Genome Editing
Genome editing enables a scientist or, potentially, a physician to perform sequence-targeted modifications of DNA. Recent advances in this field have made it possible to modify almost any gene in the human body with the ability to directly turn on, turn off or edit disease-causing genes. This has the potential to address diseases that have previously been intractable to traditional gene therapy, gene knock-down or other genome modification techniques.
The CRISPR/Cas9 (clustered, regularly interspaced short palindromic repeats)/Cas9 (CRISPR associated protein 9) system, the newest genome editing approach, uses a protein-RNA complex composed of an enzyme known as Cas9 bound to a guide RNA molecule that has been designed to recognize a particular DNA sequence. The RNA molecules guide the Cas9 complex to the location in the genome that requires repair. CRISPR/Cas9 uniquely enables highly efficient knock-out, knock-down or selective editing of defective genes in the context of their natural promoters, unlocking the potential to treat the root cause of a broad range of diseases.
About Editas Medicine
Editas Medicine is a leading genome editing company and part of a transformational new area of health care – genomic medicine. The company was founded by pioneers and world leaders in genome editing bringing specific expertise in CRISPR/Cas9 and TALENs technologies. The company's mission is to translate its proprietary technology into novel solutions to treat a broad range of genetically driven diseases. For more information, visit www.editasmedicine.com.
Contacts
Pure Communications, Inc.
Dan Budwick, 973-271-6085
[email protected]