ERS Genomics Completes 45 CRISPR Licensing Deals To Date, Largely For Screening, Discovery

12 Jun 2019

Despite being ineligible to license its CRISPR technology for human gene and cell therapy applications, ERS is doing considerable business with biopharmas for internal R&D projects.

Genetic engineering, GMO and Gene manipulation concept. Hand is inserting sequence of DNA. 3D illustration of DNA. - Image — Several companies license out rights to CRISPR gene-editing technology

As one of six companies with rights to out-license CRISPR/Cas9 gene-editing technology, ERS Genomics Ltd. has completed 45 such deals so far, with most of the licenses taken by biopharmaceutical companies. ERS CEO Eric Rhodes told Scrip that while his company also makes deals outside of human life science applications, to date more than 90% of its licenses have gone to the biopharma industry.

Rights to the CRISPR (Clustered Regularly Interspaced Short Palindromic Repeats) technology are held by six companies in total, set up...