Amazon-backed biotech Mammoth raises $200m for diseases push
California group co-founded by Nobel Prize winner Jennifer Doudna seeks to expand use of gene-editing tool
Mammoth Biosciences, the biotech co-founded by Nobel Prize winner Jennifer Doudna and that counts Amazon as a backer, has raised almost $200m to expand its use of novel Crispr-associated proteins into an effort to cure genetic diseases.
The California-based start-up is now valued at $1bn following a $150m round led by venture capitalists Redmile Group, with participation from Foresite Capital. It follows a $45m fundraising the company had in late 2020.
Mammoth hunts the world for new versions of the bacterial immune system that can be used as a gene-editing tool known as Crispr, or clustered regularly interspaced short palindromic repeats.
Its discovery of new smaller proteins associated with Crispr have already enabled novel diagnostics, including cheap and accurate Covid-19 tests, and may be more effective at delivering the editing tool as a treatment into the body, also known as “in vivo”.
Doudna, who won the Nobel Prize for co-discovering Crispr with her colleague Emanuelle Charpentier, said Mammoth is in a “unique position” to enable novel treatments and diagnostic tools.
“An exciting example is Mammoth’s ultra-small CRISPR systems that advance in vivo delivery options that can dramatically improve the lives of patients.”
Mammoth is now working with a network of microbe hunters who scour volcanoes, sewers and polluted wastelands, as well as re-examining existing data sets, for previously unnoticed proteins. Lucas Harrington, co-founder and chief scientific officer, said nature has done quite a bit of the “heavy lifting” to create these systems.
“This is a natural tool that is out there protecting bacteria and there’s actually tens of thousands of different versions of it that are out in nature,” he said.
Most other Crispr biotech companies are focused on the initial discovery of the Crispr-associated protein nine. But Mammoth wants to be able to offer a “menu of Crispr systems”, Harrington said.
“We definitely believe that it’s not a one-size fits all solution. I think that’s been the approach with CAS9 so far is that you have one protein, and it’s going to work for everything,” he said.
In diagnostics, Mammoth is working with UK drugmaker GlaxoSmithKline, the US National Institutes of Health, and Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency to develop tests for a broad range of infectious diseases.
Trevor Martin, Mammoth’s chief executive, said that at present people have to choose between a result that is really accurate, such as a PCR test, or rapid, like a lateral flow test.
“Where we really see that kind of long-term promise of Crispr as a diagnostic tool is in smashing that kind of choice and really being able to have something that is [an] extremely powerful, molecular result but in a very accessible format,” he said.