Google and Bill Gates want to edit your genome

Silicon Valley mega-firms invest in precision gene splicing start-up

Microsoft founder Bill Gates and Google Ventures have joined a $120m funding round for Editas Medicine Inc, a company that wants to develop a technology to edit DNA with precision, with the idea of treating fatal genetic diseases.

The investor troupe is led by Boris Nikolic, who is a former chief adviser for science and technology at Microsoft, and who has also now joined Editas' board.

The latest round, which contains a number of other Silicon Valley investors, has apparently picked up three times as much funding as its last round in 2013. The Massachusetts-based firm is using a technology called CRISPR [clustered regularly interspaced short palindromic repeats]-Cas9, which uses "spacers" in the gene sequence to mutate genomes and avoid a bacterial immune response, or in other words cut out segments of DNA that are ‘faulty' and replace them with specially-grown healthy ones.

Editas CEO Katrine Bosley commented that "the power of CRISPR-Cas9 is broadly appreciated" and that "all of these investors" understand the "marathon" the company is involved in in bringing the technique to realisation, referring perhaps to a race against other companies, including Crispr Therapeutics, Cellectis SA, Intellia Therapeutics and Precision BioSciences.

Editas has so far refused to work on what's known as the "human germline", which could result in changes made to sperm, eggs and embryos to make permanent, potentially hereditary changes to the entire human race's genome, and affect future generations over time.