How Epic Bio is leveraging CRISPR without cutting DNA

Hello. And welcome to Beyond Biotech, the weekly podcast from Labiatek. I'm Dylan Kossain, and this is episode 195 for the podcast. This week, we dive into the Beyond Biotech archive to bring you a discussion with doctor Stanley Chee, the founder of EpicBio. EpicBio is an epigenetic editing company leveraging the power of CRISPR without cutting DNA. The company's proprietary gene expression modulation system, GEMS, includes the smallest Cas protein known to work in human cells, enabling in vivo or ex vivo delivery via a single viral vector. In this episode, we discuss epigenetic editing, why it's reversible, and how it can treat FSHD and other conditions. We'll be back with a new episode next week. But in the meantime, please enjoy this discussion with Stanley Chee. Our episode today is brought to you with the support of MedChem Express or MCE, a global leader in life science reagents. MCE provides end to end support for biopharmaceutical innovation, specifically empowering gene therapy through high purity oligonucleotide synthesis, including ASOs and c RNAs and GMP lipids that enhance delivery efficiency. With more than a 100,000 inhibitors and rigorous cGMP inspected quality, MCE is the ultimate partner for cutting edge drug discovery and clinical breakthroughs. Learn more about MCE at medchemexpress.com. You've had a very interesting career to this date. So I wonder if maybe to start, you could tell me a little bit about some of the things that you've done so far in the biotech field. Yeah. Sure. I'm currently, associate professor of bioengineering at Stanford University. And my primary research direction is to get better technologies and tools that we could use to, modify and control the human genome beyond gene editing. And besides using these tools for research, we have a big goal to translate some of these tools into the therapeutic domain, such as new gene therapy or cell therapy for disease that really demands a new technology. For my training background, I originally got my PhD from UC Berkeley in bioengineering. However, even before that I was trained as a physicist and, I have been working on synthetic biology and biofuel production and methods on that for a couple years before I transitioned my attention fully onto tackling the technologies and the treatments for the human disease. And after my PhD at Berkeley, I also worked for a few years at UCSF to as an independent fellow and there we co develop technologies like Nucleus DAT, dCas9 and CRISPR I, CRISPR A. And then after we move I moved my lab to Stanford, we've been very much focused on thinking how we could use these technologies to treat disease. And then we have particular focus on the human epigenome, such as the epigenetic editing. Is that what led to the formation of EpicBio? Oh, yes. So we've been working in this domain for more than decade, and, it all started with the need, the huge need that the question is, how can we precisely modify …