In between bites of thin, crispy slices of pizza at Berkeley’s Pizzeria da Laura, gene editing researcher Fyodor Urnov and venture capitalist Johnny Hu began hatching a plan for a different kind of CRISPR company.
It was spring 2024 and Urnov, a professor at the University of California, Berkeley, had been lecturing and writing about how CRISPR could treat scores of patients with ultra-rare mutations — if only regulators and companies acted accordingly. Hu, who got his Ph.D. in gene editing before becoming a principal at Menlo Ventures, wanted to help.
“Johnny said — I’ll never forget this — ‘how realistic is any of this?’” Urnov recalled. “I looked at Johnny and said, ‘look, for me, the question goes right over to you. You and I both agree that, technologically, we can do this, but how do you build this into a company that actually succeeds?’”
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