Prime Medicine

Prime Medicine leverages prime editing to develop novel therapeutics for genetic diseases with a focus on liver and eye-related diseases and neuromuscular indications. Prime editing is a gene editing technology that corrects disease-causing genetic mutations without making double-stranded breaks in the DNA. It is licensed from the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard and can replace mutated DNA in its exact location within a genome, using its prime editors, which are capable of correcting all mutations in DNA and multiple mutations simultaneously. 

As of March 2024, Prime Medicine’s clinical pipeline included a portfolio of nine candidates, with its lead candidate, an ex-vivo treatment for Chronic Granulomatous Disease, being in IND-enabling stages. Additionally, the company has four lead optimization candidates while its other four candidates are in discovery stages.

Key customers and partnerships

Prime Medicine has a partnership with Beam Therapeutics, a fellow gene editing company leveraging the base editing technology. Both Prime and Beam were founded by David Liu and through the collaboration, Prime licensed its prime editing technology for Beam’s sickle cell disease indication in return for other technology and intellectual property rights. 

More recently, in August 2023, Prime Medicine partnered with MaxCyte , Inc., a cell-engineering focused company to advance next-generation gene editing therapies for patients. Through the partnership, Prime Medicine obtained non-exclusive clinical and commercial rights to use MaxCyte’s ‘Flow Electroporation’ technology and ‘ExPERT’ platform. In return, MaxCyte was entitled to receive annual license fees and program-related revenue.

In June 2023, the company also partnered with cell therapy provider Cimeio Therapeutics to form a research collaboration to combine their respective technologies, including Prime Medicine’s Prime Editing platform and Cimeio’s Shielded Cell and Immunotherapy Pairs (SCIP) platform. Prime also partnered with Myeloid Therapeutics in April 2022 to research and develop delivery technologies for ex vivo and in vivo cell therapies using prime editing. 

Funding and financials

In January 2024, Prime Medicine received USD 15 million from the Cystic Fibrosis Foundation (CFF). The funds were set aside to start up a gene-editing programme for the disease.