Tessera technologies name change12/30/2023 ![]() Spun out of the biotech venture capital company Flagship Pioneering in 2018, the company issued a press release about its trademarked Gene Writing technology-a trio of techniques that von Maltzahn says all use MGEs-in 2020. ![]() Yet Tessera seems to have stolen the spotlight. I think this year will be the year of gene writing.” See: “ Adapting with a Little Help from Jumping Genes” “Last year we had the year of base editing, prime editing. ![]() “We are continuously improving the technology,” says Marc Güell, cofounder and chief scientific officer of Integra Therapeutics. In March, Integra completed a roughly $6.3 million seed round of government and private funding. And Integra, based in Barcelona, Spain, has conducted preclinical tests of a similar MGE system, also dubbed Gene Writing, first described last December in Nature Communications. Massachusetts-based SalioGen Therapeutics, which closed a $115 million Series B financing round in January, is testing an MGE-based gene therapy platform for clinical applications that it calls Gene Coding. It’s far from the only company to try to make this technology a reality. In theory, explains company cofounder and board chair Geoffrey von Maltzahn, this could allow researchers to swap any individual base pair for any other.įor all of its investor interest, Tessera remains something of an enigma to researchers within both academia and industry. Tessera instead plans to use mobile genetic elements (MGEs)-stretches of genetic material that are thought to make up half the human genome and are capable of moving around that genome without making double-strand breaks. But researchers are limited in the types of changes they can make using these technologies-base editing, for example, can currently only substitute purine bases for other purines or pyrimidines for pyrimidines. Some successes of this new generation of genome-editing technologies include prime editing and base editing, which involve nicking DNA with a Cas nuclease and relying partly on the cell’s own DNA repair machinery to make precise changes. Newer and gentler approaches have since emerged in which the brute force of a nuclease’s double-strand breaks is replaced by single-strand breaks (also known as nicks) or sometimes no breaks at all, greatly increasing the efficiency and precision of gene edits. Such breaks can be difficult for the cell to repair, however, leaving the genome vulnerable to errors in addition to the alterations researchers want to make. In the early years, the most tried-and-true approach was to harness the abilities of natural or engineered nucleases-such as various Cas enzymes, transcription activator-like effector nucleases (TALENs), and zinc fingers-to break both strands of DNA’s signature double helix. Since CRISPR-Cas9 gene editing was first described in 2012, scientists have grown increasingly competent at editing, inserting, or deleting specific stretches of an organism’s DNA. However, Tessera has shared precious little data with the world, and the approach that it’s championing is riddled with technical hurdles, raising questions among some researchers about whether the company can deliver what it’s promised. The company claims that its techniques to “rewrite” or “write into” the genome without cleaving the DNA molecule, will help usher in a new era of highly effective, specific, and mechanistically simple gene editing. The company is developing a suite of technologies it calls Gene Writing, all intended to expand the range of possible insertions, deletions, or edits that can be made to genetic material, while reducing the number of off-target alterations produced by more-traditional methods such as CRISPR-Cas9.
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