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Two companies aiming to make better babies by tweaking the DNA of embryos were invited to talk about the future of the technology at SynBioBeta, a major gathering of the biotech world scheduled for earlier this month in San Jose, Calif. As the discussion’s moderator, I felt eager to hear more from them about their science and how they might commercialize it. The only problem: By the time the conference rolled around, both companies weren’t in business anymore.

One of the now defunct embryo editing companies was Bootstrap Bio. CEO Chase Denecke said it failed because it simply ran out of money. Persuading more investors to get on board was a challenge when people are barred from using edited embryos to create pregnancies, raising questions about how many customers such a startup could ever attract. “It will obviously be a lot easier to raise money if we have less regulatory barriers,” Denecke said.

The other startup, Manhattan Genomics, fell apart amid a disagreement between its co-founders, Eriona Hysolli and Cathy Tie. The company folded during discussions on moving from the Cayman Islands to the U.S.

Hysolli previously worked at Colossal Biosciences, an Austin-based startup that has raised money from billionaire Thomas Tull, the CIA’s venture arm and many others to edit animal embryos and attempt to resurrect a slew of extinct animals, most notably woolly mammoths. She still thinks human embryo editing could be a good business. But first, she said, scientists have to show the technology is safe and can cure diseases. “It’s up to us to win over hearts and minds,” she told me.

Looking over what happened to Bootstrap Bio and Manhattan Genomics made something evident to me: It’s still a tough road for anyone interested in starting an embryo editing company, a concept that has attracted the attention of Silicon Valley’s elite.

Companies trying to develop treatments for diseases using gene editing have been around for more than a decade, but they have focused on children and adults. The idea of editing embryos was considered too risky to even try. Scientists worry that cutting, editing or inserting DNA in cells might cause unintended problems, and that the edits in embryos would also pass to future generations.

The prospect of embryo editing got an even greater setback in 2018 when Chinese scientist He Jiankui announced at an international gene editing summit that he had created the world’s first gene-edited babies. The conference organizers called his actions irresponsible and said it was too early to use the technology in clinics. Some scientists called for a global ban.

Chinese authorities seemed to agree, jailing him for three years for the illegal practice of medicine. Scientists have questioned whether the parents of the babies understood the risks of the experiment and whether the edits even worked. He claimed he had edited the embryos to be immune to HIV.

His jailing chilled enthusiasm among researchers interested in the possible commercial expansion of embryo editing. Formidable barriers for prospective embryo editing companies remain today. Three prominent cell and gene therapy industry groups last year called for a 10-year moratorium on gene editing embryos, saying not enough safety data existed to justify its use.

Still, the icy climate for the technology hasn’t stopped startups from attempting to test it nor discouraged the tech elite from writing them checks. Last year, for instance, San Francisco–based Preventive announced it had raised $30 million from backers including OpenAI’s Sam Altman and Coinbase’s Brian Armstrong. (“I think the time is right for the defining company in the US to be built in this area,” Armstrong wrote on X.)

Preventive reportedly has considered conducting embryo editing experiments in countries with looser regulations than the U.S. Other startups could follow its lead to increase their odds of survival. CEO Lucas Harrington has said Preventive is studying embryo editing to prevent serious genetic diseases. He has promised it won’t participate in experiments to impregnate women with edited embryos before it has shown the technology is safe.

And despite the closure of Manhattan Genomics, Tie, one of its two co-founders, told me she has already started another embryo editing company, Origin Genomics, which has a lab in New York City. She wouldn’t name the funders.

Tie, a former Thiel fellow, only intends Origin to work in the U.S. with approval from ethics boards. (In an unusual twist in the saga of this industry, Tie was previously romantically involved with He, the Chinese scientist who shocked the world and went to prison.)

She compared the controversy over embryo editing to the introduction of in vitro fertilization in the 1970s. At first people were uncomfortable with the safety and ethics of creating embryos in a petri dish and using them to make babies. Now IVF represents 2% percent of annual births in the U.S.—somewhere around 100,000 babies a year. Tie thinks embryo editing can follow a similar trajectory. “If we can show it is safe, there will be a market,” she said.

Last month, Tie argued in favor of embryo editing at a public debate in New York sponsored by the Hastings Center for Bioethics, a prominent research institute. Vardit Ravitsky, the center’s president and the debate moderator, later told me that when it comes to embryo editing, “The question has become not whether but rather how.”

In San Jose at SynBioBeta, I asked Jamie Justice, executive vice president for health at the XPrize Foundation, which holds competitions to encourage scientific innovation, if there was a way for companies to pursue embryo editing.

Justice thinks the regulatory barriers are so high that any company will have to meet a rigorous standard to move forward: Parents hoping to use a gene editing service would have to show that a lethal genetic disease that couldn’t be treated after birth, such as Huntington’s disease, affected all their embryos, Justice said. In her view, all these conditions mean the commercial market for embryo editing is limited.

“We have this tiny, almost infinitesimally small percentage that might actually create the use case,” she said.

One way to expand the future market is for companies to eventually move beyond embryo editing for diseases and use the technology to enhance traits like intelligence, athletic prowess and musical ability. However, the repugnance many people share about the idea of parents ordering up superbabies is hard to avoid in any conversation about embryo editing.

Even though the current crop of embryo editing companies say they are only focusing on editing disease genes, there may come a time when parents argue there is no reason to stop there, said Jonathan Anomaly, a co-founder of Herasight, a genetic screening company that predicts the probability of embryos having serious diseases as well as traits like intelligence.

Anomaly was at SynBioBeta, too, where he put forward the most controversial view of all. He argued that drawing a line between using embryo editing to treat diseases and using it to enhance abilities is not morally justifiable. Both are based on parents wanting to improve the future lives of their children, Anomaly said. SynBioBeta prides itself on highlighting boundary-pushing views, but outside Silicon Valley, his argument is likely to rile people up.

Anomaly doesn’t expect to see many thriving embryo editing companies of any kind any time soon. Getting rid of complex conditions like heart disease, he said, might require editing hundreds of genes in every cell, a formidable task.

There may be a commercial market for these services someday, but he thinks that possibility is decades away. “The science isn’t there now,” he said.