The world of medicine is about to change. Diseases that had no treatment and conditions that cause lifelong suffering may well be cured at the source. Biotechnology has advanced to the point where the human genome can be edited and fixed! Companies that are on the leading edge of this new technology will not only change the world of medicine and your life. They can be profitable as well. Three gene editing companies in particular are worth your attention as noted in an article in the Motley Fool.
If you’re looking to invest in stocks positioned to benefit from a literally game-changing technology, check out stocks of biotechs that are focused on gene editing. The future of medicine is likely to be radically transformed by therapies that involve the insertion, deletion, or replacement of DNA.
Three of the hottest gene-editing biotech stocks on the market right now are Sangamo Therapeutics (NASDAQ:SGMO), Editas Medicine (NASDAQ:EDIT), and Intellia Therapeutics (NASDAQ:NTLA). But which of these is the best pick for investors? Here’s how these three gene-editing stocks stack up.
As always with new technologies, the issue of profits depends on how well the technology works, how efficiently it can be applied, how large a market its product will have, and whether or not a company will control its market niche or have to compete with other similar technologies. The other issue for medical treatments is passage through the FDA process to demonstrate effectiveness and safety of use.
Here are the three companies highlighted in the article and the diseases their therapies are intended to treat.
Sangamo Therapeutics: Hemophilia A, amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, beta-thalassemia
Editas Medicine: Sickle cell disease, beta-thalassemia, cystic fibrosis, Duchenne muscular dystrophy, and editing of T-cells in treating cancer.
Intellia Therapeutics: gene-editing therapies to target treatment of up to 10 indications and using gene editing in hematopoietic stem cells and chimeric antigen receptor T-cells
The company with the most solid results so far is Sangamo. In order to invest in gene editing companies and make a profit you may want to pick the most likely winner with a treatment that is far along the FDA pipeline. However, the stock will have a higher price the closer its treatment is to going on the market. If you are going to invest in gene editing companies in the search of the highest profit you need to get in early and consider investing in several or order to catch the eventual winners when their share prices are cheap. The current state of the art technology that is driving the world is gene editing as called CRISPR-Cas9.
CRISPR-Cas9
According to New England Biolabs CRISPR-Cas9 is the newest and best tool that has opened the door to effective gene editing.
The development of efficient and reliable ways to make precise, targeted changes to the genome of living cells is a long-standing goal for biomedical researchers. Recently, a new tool based on a bacterial CRISPR-associated protein-9 nuclease (Cas9) from Streptococcus pyogenes has generated considerable excitement.
This was first noted in the 1980s but not confirmed until the last decade. Using this tool from nature will allow bio tech companies to design treatments for wide range of genetically based diseases. One issue is patent rights to use the treatment and in that regard Editas has won court battles for patent rights which opens the door for them to develop and sell gene therapies based on the CRISPR technology.