CRISPR Therapeutics Brand Guidelines: Zug, Boston & Casgevy With Vertex

A Nobel-winning tool turned into a company.

CRISPR Therapeutics is a Swiss–American biotechnology company headquartered in Zug, Switzerland. English Wikipedia gives its founding year as 2013 and its founders as Emmanuelle Charpentier, Shaun Foy and Rodger Novak, and says that in the United States it does business as CRISPR Therapeutics, Inc. The company’s own timeline also starts in 2013, a year after Charpentier, Jennifer Doudna and colleagues published the paper that described CRISPR/Cas9 as a gene-editing tool. Charpentier and Doudna shared the 2020 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for that work.

The name is the technology: the company was set up to turn CRISPR/Cas9 editing into medicines, and it has kept the acronym as its brand rather than inventing a coined word. English Wikipedia lists offices in Zug, Boston, San Francisco and London. The company says it opened its R&D headquarters in Boston in 2022, and that its own manufacturing site in Framingham, Massachusetts, opened in 2021.

Two early deals shaped the business. In 2015 it began a research collaboration with Vertex Pharmaceuticals on CRISPR/Cas9 treatments for genetic disease, and in 2016 it agreed with Bayer to run a joint venture, Casebia Therapeutics, under its own management, according to English Wikipedia. The company listed on the Nasdaq in October 2016. Samarth Kulkarni, who joined in 2015 as chief business officer, became chief executive in 2017.

The company’s own timeline marks the steps from laboratory to clinic. It says it released the first patient data on a CRISPR-based investigational therapy in 2019, later published in the New England Journal of Medicine, and that in 2020 it announced its first clinical data on a CRISPR-edited allogeneic CAR T cell therapy, a donor-derived cell treatment for cancer. In 2022, it says, it formed a team called CRISPR-X in Boston and San Francisco to work on new editing technologies.

Casgevy, made and licensed by Vertex.

The collaboration with Vertex produced exagamglogene autotemcel, first known as CTX001 and later shortened to exa-cel, and sold as Casgevy. It is an ex vivo therapy: the UK regulator describes how stem cells are taken from a patient’s bone marrow, edited in a laboratory and then infused back. CRISPR Therapeutics says Vertex is the manufacturer and exclusive licence holder of Casgevy, and that the Casgevy word mark is a Vertex trademark.

The approvals came in quick succession. On 16 November 2023 the UK’s MHRA authorised Casgevy for sickle cell disease and transfusion-dependent beta thalassaemia in patients aged 12 and over, and called it the first medicine to be licensed that uses CRISPR. On 8 December 2023 the US FDA approved it for sickle cell disease in patients aged 12 and over, on the same day as a second gene therapy, and named Casgevy the first FDA-approved therapy to use CRISPR/Cas9; the FDA approval went to Vertex. The European Medicines Agency records a conditional marketing authorisation valid across the EU from 9 February 2024, held by Vertex’s Irish company. The company’s own timeline also lists an approval in Bahrain in 2023. On 30 October 2026 the MHRA extended the UK authorisation to eligible children aged five and over.

Behind the approved product sits a wider pipeline that the company presents in areas it calls immuno-oncology, autoimmune disease, in vivo editing and regenerative medicine. English Wikipedia describes CTX310, an in vivo programme aimed at the ANGPTL3 gene in the liver, and lists partners including ViaCyte, Nkarta, Capsida and CureVac. These remain investigational programmes, and the company’s own pages say so.

Design and documentation.

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.

A brand that is also the name of the science.

The identity problem for CRISPR Therapeutics is unusual. Its name is a scientific acronym that every rival, journalist and university lab also uses, so the company has to be recognisable while sharing its core word with a whole field. Its own pages answer with plain copy and careful legal qualifiers about which countries have approved which uses.

Those qualifiers are part of the brand. The company’s therapies page points out that the therapy arose from the Vertex collaboration, that Vertex makes and licenses it, and that it is approved only in some countries for certain eligible patients. A brand guide for a company in this position has to plan for long footnotes, trademark notices and partner credits as standard parts of a page, not as afterthoughts.

The company’s two-country set-up shows in its language as well. English Wikipedia describes it as Swiss–American and headquartered in Zug, while the company says its R&D headquarters and its manufacturing site are in Massachusetts. Awards are part of the story too: the company says its Framingham plant received the International Society for Pharmaceutical Engineering’s 2022 Facility of the Year Award in the innovation category, and English Wikipedia records the same award.

For a design guide, CRISPR Therapeutics shows how a company can build an identity on a shared scientific word and let partner credits and regulatory wording sit inside the system. Compare bluebird bio, whose sickle cell gene therapy was approved by the FDA on the same day, and Intellia, another company built on CRISPR editing. For this guide we use a deep teal, a dark ink and a soft coral with a sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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