Startups 2024
Emerging Startup
Epitome Therapeutics
Innovation & Business Idea
A catalogue of human disorders and disease susceptibilities are directly triggered by aberrant changes in the epigenome and/or gene activity. Therapeutic approaches aimed at restoring appropriate epigenetic marks and gene activity therefore represent a powerful strategy for combating these disease states. Chemical compounds that affect epigenome-modifying enzymes are currently used for diverse indications, including cancer. However, these drugs lack specificity for disease-driving (epi)genomic targets and are often accompanied by sub-optimal activity, undesired side-effects and toxicity. The precision medicine strategy of epigenome editing overcomes these limitations by enabling precision manipulation of gene activity at target disease-causing genes.
We have engineered an unprecedented epigenome editing platform technology, with class-leading efficiency, and the capacity to precisely programme nine key chromatin modifications at desired genomic targets. As a result, our modular technology enables target gene expression to be precisely tuned, including allele-specifically. As opposed to genome editing, which creates DNA breaks and makes irreversible changes to regulatory and coding sequences, epigenome editing leaves the DNA sequence intact, erasing concerns regarding off-targeting DNA damage, unpredictable DNA damage-repair responses and mutagenesis. Moreover, by leveraging the regulatory power of epigenetic marks, our epigenome editing approach can achieve changes which are long-lasting and heritable across cell division. Finally, epigenome editing is multiplexable, enabling targeting of several genes/regulatory regions simultaneously and allele-specifically. Taken together, our platform technology holds several strategic advantages over genome editing and constitutes a safer and more flexible approach to fine-tune gene expression within appropriate therapeutic ranges to reverse cellular dysfunction and disease.
Contact
Jamie Hackett
European Molecular Biology Laboratory (EMBL), Epigenetics & Neurobiology Unit, Rome, Italy
jamie.hackett@embl.it
