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BEAM Therapeautics
The leadership of Beam Therapeutics consists of three co-founders, a chief executive officer, chief scientific officer, chief human resources officer, chief legal officer, senior vice presidents, vice presidents and board members. The company has a private status and it is located in Massachusetts. It is the first company to be working on CRISPR base editing technology as a way to advance precision genetic drugs.
RESEARCH
- The research of the company is focused on the CRISPR base editing technology which they are working on.
- Beam Therapeutics is also working on base editor therapeutics research which will enable them to manufacture new brands of genetic drugs.
- The company is also using different technologies to transfer base editors to different cells and tissues.
- One of the researches conducted by the company's investigators showed the possibility of prenatal editing metabolic genes using CRISPR.
- Another study also showed that there was a possibility of editing genomic DNA and targeting this for therapeutic purposes.
LEADERSHIP TEAM
- Beam Therapeutics management team comprises co-founders, chief executive officer, chief scientific officer, chief legal officer, senior vice presidents, vice presidents and board members.
- The co-founders are David Liu, Feng Zhang and Keith Joung and they are professors of Chemistry and Chemical Biology, Neuroscience and Pathology respectively.
- John Evans came on board as the chief executive officer in 2017. He was appointed as a board member as well.
- Giuseppe Ciaramella is the chief scientific officer of the company, and he has over two decades experience in drug discovery.
- Dr Christine Bellon occupies two positions in the company namely chief legal officer and senior vice president.
- Susan O’Connor works as the chief human resources officer.
- The senior vice presidents of the company are Suzanne Fleming (handles finance), Courtney Wallace (handles Business Development and Strategy) and Christine Bellon who also doubles as the chief legal officer.
- Dana Levasseur, Francine Gregoire and Manmohan Singh are the vice president hematology, vice president for liver diseases and vice president of pharmaceutical sciences and delivery technologies respectively.
- Kristina Burow, Mark Fishman, Stephen Knight and Robert Nelsen are the board members of the company.
COMPANY BACKGROUND
- It was founded by David Liu, Feng Zhang, J. Keith Joung, John Evans in 2017 so as to enhance CRISPR base editing technology.
- The headquarters is situated in Cambridge, Massachusetts, USA.
- The company is the first to use CRISPR base editing to develop drugs to treat genetic diseases.
- Its main industry of operation is Biotechnology. However, the company also works on drug discovery.
- The company has about 61-71 employees and an estimated annual revenue of $1,500,000.
- Beam Therapeutics partners with Harvard University, The Broad Institute of Harvard and MIT and Editas Medicine.
CAPITAL RAISED
- The company has participated in two funding rounds from its inception.
- It has been able to raise a total funding amount of $222,000,000 from both rounds.
- The first funding round was done on May 14, 2018, and $87,000,000 was raised through the Series A funding.
- The investors for the Series A funding were F-Prime Capital and ARCH Venture Partners.
- The second funding round was done on March 6, 2019, and $135,000,000 was raised through the Series B funding.
- The investors for the Series B funding were Redmile Group, ARCH Venture Partners, Altitude Life Science Ventures, Omega Funds, F-Prime Capital Partners, GV, Cormorant Asset Management and Eight Roads Ventures.
NEWS ARTICLES
- Beam Therapeutics granted Bio Palette which is a Japanese company the right to use its intellectual property to improve Asia's microbiome-related therapeutics.
- The company is working with Verve Therapeutics on the reduction of heart disease risk.
- Beam Therapeutics is using CRISPR to treat genetic diseases as a healthcare startup.
- Beam Therapeutics was granted a global license to market the CRISPR base editing technology.
SIGNIFICANT ANNOUNCEMENTS
- The company announced the current leadership team in May 2019.
- The company's CEO presented the overview of the company at the Jefferies 2019 Healthcare Conference.
- The company presented preclinical data from the base editing platform at the 2019 Annual meeting of the American Society of Gene and Cell Therapy.
- The funding realized from the 2019 Series B funding would be used to develop the company's CRISPR technologies and expand their platforms.
RESEARCH STRATEGY
We started the research by looking at the company's website to get an overview of the company. During this search, we discovered that there was a section for the research conducted by the company researchers. We also noticed that there was a news section and this helped to get information on the news articles and announcements related to the company. Information on the leadership team was found here too.
We then expanded our search by looking at databases and market analysis domains which include Crunchbase, Hoovers and Pitchbook to get additional information to get information on the revenue, number of employees and capital raised. This is because the annual report of the company is not available because it is a public company. We also searched news and media platforms such as Forbes, CNN, Financial times and Huffington Post to get additional information on the press releases by the company to find announcements and news articles that mentioned the company.