Beam Therapeutics Brand Guidelines: Base Editing, Cambridge 2017 & One DNA Letter at a Time

A Harvard lab’s tool, licensed to a start-up.

Beam Therapeutics was founded in 2017 in Cambridge, Massachusetts, English Wikipedia says, and traces its origins to the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard; its co-founders include the chemist David R. Liu and Feng Zhang. The company spent its first year out of public view. When it came out of stealth in May 2018, MedCity News reported that it had been in operation for about a year, had 15 employees and had hired John Evans, a former executive at Agios Pharmaceuticals, as chief executive. Its Series A round was led by the venture firms ARCH Venture Partners and F-Prime Capital Partners.

The company was built around a single technique. On 14 May 2018 Harvard’s Office of Technology Development announced that it had granted Beam a worldwide licence to a suite of DNA base editing technologies invented in Liu’s Harvard laboratory. Harvard described base editors as engineered proteins that use a modified form of the Cas9 enzyme to open a small section of DNA and convert one base — one of the letters A, C, G and T — into another, without cutting both strands of the DNA. Liu’s team had reported versions of the method in Nature in 2016 and in a run of papers through February 2018, the university said.

Beam’s licences went beyond Harvard. MedCity News reported that it also had agreements with the Broad Institute for Zhang’s RNA base editing technology, and with Editas Medicine for technologies Editas had licensed from Harvard, the Broad Institute and Massachusetts General Hospital. Wikipedia adds that the company now works with prime editing as well as base editing.

Evans set out the reasoning at launch. About half of the mutations that drive genetic disease are point mutations — changes to a single letter — and so are candidates for base editing, he told MedCity News. He said Beam was then looking at ten to fifteen disease targets, without naming them, and that its treatments could be made either outside the body, in blood stem cells or T cells, or inside it, delivered by viral vectors or lipid nanoparticles.

From a sickle cell program to a pipeline.

Beam went public in February 2020, Wikipedia says. In January 2022 Pfizer and Beam announced a research collaboration to develop therapies for rare diseases, according to Wikipedia, which cites Pfizer’s own announcement.

The company has also narrowed its plans. On 19 October 2023 Beam said it would lay off 100 employees, about a fifth of its workforce, pause some research and look for partners for several programs, BioPharma Dive reported. It chose to put its resources into its sickle cell programs, including the treatment then called BEAM-101, into a program for alpha-1 antitrypsin deficiency and into an initial trial for glycogen storage disease type 1a. Work on an early hepatitis B program stopped, and Beam said it would seek a partner for that program and for its ex vivo CAR-T cell therapies. Beam would generate what it called a “focused clinical dataset” for BEAM-201, the most advanced of the CAR-T programs, a leukemia treatment. The layoffs were to be completed by the end of 2023, and the company said the savings would let it fund operations into 2026. BioPharma Dive counted Beam as at least the eleventh gene therapy or gene editing company to lay off staff that year, alongside Editas Medicine and others. Chief executive John Evans wrote on LinkedIn that the company had to make “hard choices” in difficult financial markets, the publication reported.

BEAM-101 has since been renamed. The company’s website now calls it ristoglogene autogetemcel, or risto-cel: an investigational treatment for severe sickle cell disease in which a patient’s own blood stem cells are base-edited outside the body and returned through a stem cell transplant. The company says the edit is made in the promoter regions of the HBG1 and HBG2 genes and is designed to raise production of fetal hemoglobin. Beam says it is being studied in the Phase 1/2 BEACON trial and that the US Food and Drug Administration has granted it orphan drug and Regenerative Medicine Advanced Therapy designations. Wikipedia notes that clinical trial results on risto-cel were published in 2026.

Gene editing and the cell-therapy sector.

Cell and gene therapy companies sell something that is hard to picture. A treatment may be a patient’s own cells, collected, changed in a laboratory and returned as a single dose, or a gene carried into the body by a modified virus. With no tablet or pack to show, these companies build their imagery from a small, shared set of motifs.

The most common is the abstract double helix, often drawn in light against a dark ground, followed closely by glowing cells, strands and particles rendered in soft blues, violets and teals. Where the science is shown more literally, the pictures move to the laboratory: gloved hands holding cryobags and vials, technicians in gowns, and clean manufacturing suites with stainless steel and bright, even light. Manufacturing matters to the story, because many of these treatments are made one patient at a time.

The other half of the visual language is human. Because most of these therapies are aimed at rare and inherited diseases, the companies lean on portraits of patients and their families, photographed at home or outdoors rather than in clinics, and on first-person stories told in their own words. Treatment centres, patient-support programmes and the steps of the “patient journey” often get as much space on a website as the science itself.

The field also has its own calendar. Companies present data and court investors and clinicians at meetings such as the annual meeting of the American Society of Gene & Cell Therapy (ASGCT), the American Society of Hematology (ASH) meeting in December, where blood-disorder therapies are discussed, and the Cell & Gene Meeting on the Mesa, an industry gathering. Names in the sector can change through spin-offs, sales and rebrands, so the identity a company shows at one meeting may not be the one it uses a few years later.

Cambridge research, North Carolina manufacturing.

Beam’s website lists a pipeline split between edited cells and in vivo medicines. Beside risto-cel it names BEAM-302, for alpha-1 antitrypsin deficiency; BEAM-301, for glycogen storage disease type 1a; and ESCAPE, a research platform that pairs an antibody, BEAM-103, with edited stem cells designed to evade it. All are investigational.

The company’s research base remains in Cambridge, Massachusetts, which its website calls home to its “bio-tech hub.” It says its manufacturing facility is in Research Triangle Park, at Durham in North Carolina. John Evans, who joined in 2017, is still chief executive, according to the company’s leadership page. In April 2026, the company says, it was named one of the TIME100 Most Influential Companies, and Evans was included on the TIME100 Health list.

The name itself fits the technique. Beam’s website describes the company as “revolutionizing gene-based editing, one letter at a time,” and, in its values, as “a community of fearless innovators.”

For a design guide, Beam Therapeutics shows a brand built on one precise idea, explained in plain words: a single letter changed in the genetic code. Compare Editas Medicine, whose technology Beam licensed in 2018, and Pfizer, which announced a research collaboration with Beam in January 2022. For this guide we use night indigo, amber and a lavender haze with a sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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