A St. Louis company focused on developing better soybean genetics has made a new discovery that could be used to treat cancer. Confluence Genetics launched Cas-CLEAR last month, saying the new CRISPR gene editing technology platform can eliminate cancer cells with specific genetic signatures.
The discovery grew out of research into new gene editing chemistry that Benson Hill was pursuing over a decade ago for plants, a time when much of the early CRISPR technology was more focused on human applications, says Confluence Genetics senior director of research and development Matt Begemann. (Benson Hill’s intellectual property was folded into Confluence Genetics last year after the former filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection last year.)
“We found a lot of gene editing chemistry that worked really well in plants, and we also found some editing chemistry that did not work well in plants,” he says. “We were thinking about putting it on the shelf and maybe never coming back to it.”…