iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

Reposted by Benjamin L. Oakes

Scribe Therapeutics @scribetx.bsky.social · 30/06/2026

Next Tuesday, we’re presenting at #GENESRC, the Genome Engineering: Research and Applications conference hosted by @faseborg.bsky.social. Details below on our session about increasing the potency of CasX-based editors to enable safer, more effective CRISPR-based therapeutics. #FASEB #CRISPR

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Reposted by Benjamin L. Oakes

Scribe Therapeutics @scribetx.bsky.social · 20/06/2025

“In reality, you’re seeing nothing but good data come out of the CRISPR space. I don’t believe the ability to cure patients is going anywhere.” – @benjaminloakes.bsky.social, Scribe CEO in GEN on delivering the full promise of #CRISPR Read more here and our 🧵: www.genengnews.com/topics/genom...

genengnews.com

Advancing CRISPR Cures Requires Cross-Sector Collaboration

Amid a challenging gene editing climate, partnerships between researchers, regulators, and industry remain crucial for pushing CRISPR cures to the clinic.

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Reposted by Benjamin L. Oakes

Scribe Therapeutics @scribetx.bsky.social · 28/04/2025

We’re pleased to announce the achievement of a success milestone in our collaboration with Prevail Therapeutics, a part of @elilillyandcompany.bsky.social’s Gene Therapy Division, to develop in vivo #CRISPR-based therapeutics for neurological and neuromuscular disorders. Highlights below 🧵

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Benjamin L. Oakes @benjaminloakes.bsky.social · 08/04/2025

The goal is to develop therapeutics that are broadly effective and safe enough for all. But financial access is complex—most payor systems don’t know how to reward long-term health. We’ll need to push the system to redefine value as not just treating illness, but preventing it before it starts.

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Benjamin L. Oakes @benjaminloakes.bsky.social · 07/04/2025

This future is real. It’s not even decades away, it’s within reach. 🔬Building this future is what we’re doing at Scribe.🔬 So yeah, I’m likely to keep saying it: Get excited. 🚀 Spread the word. Support genetic medicine and help shape what comes next. The future of health is already on its way.

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Benjamin L. Oakes @benjaminloakes.bsky.social · 07/04/2025

🌍 Universal Safe enough to be standard. Broad enough to prevent disease across the board. We’re talking about stopping ASCVD, stroke, diabetes, kidney disease — all as part of routine care.

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Benjamin L. Oakes @benjaminloakes.bsky.social · 07/04/2025

⚡ Liberating Treatments won’t be daily pills or ongoing injections. You’ll walk into a clinic, get a highly durable treatment, and walk out fundamentally healthier. Transformative care with no upkeep required.

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Benjamin L. Oakes @benjaminloakes.bsky.social · 07/04/2025

🧬 Preventive We’ll use genetic insights to eliminate disease before it starts. Imagine taking the DNA of your healthiest 100-year-old relative — the one who never had heart disease or cancer — and making it yours. That’s the promise of genomic medicine: everyone gets to win the genetic lottery.

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Benjamin L. Oakes @benjaminloakes.bsky.social · 07/04/2025

The future of medicine is bright — and it’s going to look radically different from today. It’ll be: 🧬 Preventive ⚡ Liberating 🌍 Universal This isn’t science fiction — it’s what we’re building at @ScribeRx. Let me break it down 👇

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Reposted by Benjamin L. Oakes

Scribe Therapeutics @scribetx.bsky.social · 24/03/2025

#LpaAwarenessDay Cardiovascular disease is the leading cause of death worldwide, claiming 18 million lives each year. Did you know that 1 in 5 people have high levels of Lp(a) or lipoprotein(a), which significantly increases the risk of heart disease?

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Benjamin L. Oakes @benjaminloakes.bsky.social · 21/03/2025

Check out this 🔥 work here! www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

biorxiv.org

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Benjamin L. Oakes @benjaminloakes.bsky.social · 21/03/2025

Why I like it: This study provides a clear playbook for modern molecular engineering. Comparing this work with others in the field, it is clear that comprehensive variant mapping surpasses the effectiveness of targeted mutagenesis and assay-naïve AI engineering approaches. Plus it's just more fun!

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Benjamin L. Oakes @benjaminloakes.bsky.social · 21/03/2025

This work elegantly demonstrates how systematic variant scanning, and combinatorial assembly, can supercharge CRISPR and is similar to engineering approaches we utilize @scribetx.bsky.social for rapidly building powerful new CRISPR tools. Check it out: www.scribetx.com/platform

scribetx.com

Scribe → Platform

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Benjamin L. Oakes @benjaminloakes.bsky.social · 21/03/2025

This meticulous screening reveals specific mutations that greatly enhance TnpB’s nuclease activity. By stacking beneficial single mutations into one optimized variant (“enhanced TnpB”), they achieved up to 50-fold higher activity in plants—a reasonably respectable 🤯 leap in enzyme efficiency.

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Benjamin L. Oakes @benjaminloakes.bsky.social · 21/03/2025

Quick background: TnpB is a compact RNA-guided nuclease and the evolutionary ancestor of Cas12. In this work, the team uses deep mutational scanning with a yeast-based cleavage assay to profile every RNA & protein variation.

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Benjamin L. Oakes @benjaminloakes.bsky.social · 21/03/2025

Next, the preprint “Latent activity in TnpB revealed by mutational scanning” @brittneywthornton.bsky.social & @rfw.bsky.social et al., coming out of the Doudna & Savage labs. This work beautifully illustrates how holistic molecular engineering systematically improves CRISPR molecules

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Benjamin L. Oakes @benjaminloakes.bsky.social · 21/03/2025

Importance: These data highlight CRISPR’s immense potential for in vivo cures. Yet, as base editors may create unintended edits, the exact correction efficiency in this trial is uncertain. PRIME Medicine recently entering this disease area with RT-based editors may offer additional precision.

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Benjamin L. Oakes @benjaminloakes.bsky.social · 21/03/2025

At the highest dose, BEAM-302 boosted total AAT from 4.4 µM to 12.4 µM, surpassing the perceived therapeutic threshold of 11 µM. Importantly, the treatment appeared well-tolerated and is promising as correction strategy for AATD patients in need. Check it out: www.globenewswire.com/news-release...

globenewswire.com

Beam Therapeutics Announces Positive Initial Data for BEAM-302 in the Phase 1/2 Trial in Alpha-1 Antitrypsin Deficiency (AATD), Demonstrating First Ever Clinical Genetic Correction of a Disease-causin...

Single Dose of BEAM-302 Led to Durable, Dose-dependent Increases in Total and Functional Alpha-1 Antitrypsin (AAT), Production of Corrected M-AAT, and...

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Benjamin L. Oakes @benjaminloakes.bsky.social · 21/03/2025

First, let’s dive into BEAM’s results: this base-editing therapy uses a Cas9-deaminase fusion to target and mutate the PiZ mutation causing alpha-1 antitrypsin deficiency (AATD). Patients received doses of 15, 30, & 60 mg to assess in vivo editing efficacy.

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Benjamin L. Oakes @benjaminloakes.bsky.social · 21/03/2025

This week, I’ll highlight two recent CRISPR advances: 1) BEAM’s exciting Phase 1 clinical data for BEAM-302. 2) Impressive work from the labs of Scribe’s co-founders @savagecatsonly.bsky.social & @doudna-lab.bsky.social —providing a textbook example of engineering CRISPR enzymes from zero to hero.

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Reposted by Benjamin L. Oakes

Scribe Therapeutics @scribetx.bsky.social · 20/03/2025

From an interview with our CEO @benjaminloakes.bsky.social, PharmaVoice spotlighted our work engineering #CRISPR genome editing and epigenetic silencing platforms to target cardiometabolic disease. Read the story about our lead asset and progress: www.pharmavoice.com/news/crispr-...

pharmavoice.com

CRISPR’s cardio catch-all drives a biotech’s broad potential

Scribe Therapeutics hopes to prevent cardiometabolic diseases by targeting underlying causes with CRISPR technology.

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Reposted by Benjamin L. Oakes

Scribe Therapeutics @scribetx.bsky.social · 04/03/2025

Don’t miss @jdfev.bsky.social's late-breaking talk at @keystonesymposia.bsky.social today! 📣 Symposia Spotlight 🪧 Engineering of Next Generation Epigenetic Editors for Enhanced Durable Repression in Non-Human Primates 🕒 3:00-4:30 p.m. GMT 📍 INEC Main Auditorium

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Benjamin L. Oakes @benjaminloakes.bsky.social · 04/03/2025

💡 Want to see how these breakthroughs will help to shape the future of medicine? Don’t miss Jason Fernandes’ presentation at Keystone: Precision Genome Engineering: Translating the Human Genome to the Clinic, Tomorrow, March 4, 3:00-4:30 p.m. GMT! #KSGenomeEng25

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Benjamin L. Oakes @benjaminloakes.bsky.social · 04/03/2025

🎤 In fact, this week at Keystone Symposia, we’re unveiling major advancements in epigenetic therapies. Our engineering engines have built thousands of possibilities, uncovering stronger, safer, and more precise therapeutics.

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Benjamin L. Oakes @benjaminloakes.bsky.social · 04/03/2025

📰 It was great speaking with Ida Emilie Steinmark for The Economist’s The Age of CRISPR. The piece highlights how Scribe's epigenetic editors could give everyone access to protective genetic traits and dramatically reduce ASCVD risk. www.economist.com/technology-q...

economist.com

Epigenetic editors are a gentler form of gene editing

But they may prove just as powerful

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Benjamin L. Oakes @benjaminloakes.bsky.social · 04/03/2025

🧬 In the near future, my hope is that we can all win the genetic lottery for health—not by chance, but by design. At Scribe, we’re focused on making genetic medicines safe enough for disease prevention at scale and moving beyond gene editing into epigenetic editing.

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Benjamin L. Oakes @benjaminloakes.bsky.social · 01/03/2025

As someone with close family affected by ASCVD—and therefore at high risk myself—this mission is personal, urgent and real. We will solve this. Explore our vision for the future of ASCVD treatment—and, more importantly, prevention—below.

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Benjamin L. Oakes @benjaminloakes.bsky.social · 01/03/2025

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Benjamin L. Oakes @benjaminloakes.bsky.social · 27/02/2025

Why I like it: This work forces me to rethink the global off-target effects of prime editing, much like recent base editing insights. It’s also a call to engineer smarter tools. Check it out: www.nature.com/articles/s41...

nature.com

The reverse transcriptase domain of prime editors contributes to DNA repair in mammalian cells - Nature Biotechnology

DNA repair activity of reverse transcriptase may negatively affect prime editing precision.

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Benjamin L. Oakes @benjaminloakes.bsky.social · 27/02/2025

When Zheng et al. look more deeply at this question they find the RT domains (fused to Cas or not) cluster at DNA breaks faster than endogenous DNA repair proteins and alter repair outcomes by inserting random nucleotides. This reminds me of how Base Editors can randomly alter DNA R-loops or ssRNA.

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Benjamin L. Oakes @benjaminloakes.bsky.social · 27/02/2025

Prime editors are often touted as super precise systems but here’s a twist: past studies like Gurnewald et al. (2023) and Liu et al. (2022) show they work even without the RT fused to Cas9. That should challenge our assumptions—we don't fully understand how/where these molecules work in the cell.

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Benjamin L. Oakes @benjaminloakes.bsky.social · 27/02/2025

2. A Deeper Look at Prime Editors’ Reverse Transcriptase OTs (Zheng et al., Nat Biotech). I'm intrigued by all Cas9 fusions and how they work, and Prime editors are no exception. This work dives into how prime editors (Cas9 nickases+RTs) can override normal DNA repair.

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Benjamin L. Oakes @benjaminloakes.bsky.social · 27/02/2025

Essentially, SUPERB-seq can amplify your OT signals for single-cell analysis! Useful for capturing rare off-target events and how they impact phenotype. Why I like it: Print your Off-Targets as RNA transcripts, both simple and—in hindsight—obvious! Check it out: www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

biorxiv.org

Joint single-cell profiling of CRISPR-Cas9 edits and transcriptomes reveals widespread off-target events and their effects on gene expression

A longstanding barrier in genome engineering with CRISPR-Cas9 has been the inability to measure Cas9 edit outcomes and their functional effects at single-cell resolution. Here we present Superb-seq, a...

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Benjamin L. Oakes @benjaminloakes.bsky.social · 27/02/2025

1. A SC Off-Target (OT) ID From the grahammcvicker.bsky.social lab I always appreciate some good ole method development, and this one is nicely satisfying. They’ve taken a “GUIDE-seq” style off-target ID (oligo drop-in) and upgraded it with a barcoded T7 promoter. It makes so much sense!

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Benjamin L. Oakes @benjaminloakes.bsky.social · 27/02/2025

Trying something new—highlighting research that I find enjoyable or useful in CRISPR, molecular engineering, and cardiometabolic disease. To kick things off, here are two new papers: A clever single-cell off-target method and an exploration of how Prime Editors modify global DNA repair

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Benjamin L. Oakes @benjaminloakes.bsky.social · 25/02/2025

Check it out—we gave our website a fresh new look! 🔥 Like our CRISPR by Design™ approach, this redesign is all about precision and continuous improvement. Whether pushing the boundaries of genetic medicine or refining how we share our work, one thing never changes: at Scribe, the details matter.

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