Editas Medicine Brand Guidelines: Gengine, Cambridge 2013 & an In Vivo CRISPR Reset

Five scientists, two rival institutions and one technology.

Editas Medicine began in September 2013 under another name. English Wikipedia says it was founded as Gengine, Inc. by Feng Zhang of the Broad Institute, Jennifer Doudna of the University of California, Berkeley, and George Church, David Liu and J. Keith Joung of Harvard, with backing from the venture firms Third Rock Ventures, Polaris Partners and Flagship Ventures. Two months later it took the name Editas Medicine. Doudna left in June 2014, Wikipedia says, over differences about the intellectual property behind the Cas9 enzyme.

The timing mattered. When Editas launched in 2013, BioPharma Dive wrote in 2020, it became the first start-up formed to use CRISPR gene editing to develop human medicines, and it was quickly followed by CRISPR Therapeutics and Intellia Therapeutics. Its founders’ institutions were also on opposite sides of a long-running patent dispute. The University of California, where Doudna worked, and the Broad Institute, Zhang’s home, contested who first invented a single-guide CRISPR-Cas9 system for editing eukaryotic cells. On 12 May 2025 the US Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit vacated and sent back an earlier priority decision by the Patent Trial and Appeal Board, the law firm Morrison Foerster reported; on 26 March 2026, on remand, the board again found that the Broad Institute had priority, the same firm reported in April 2026.

The company went public on 2 February 2016, Wikipedia says. It has been based in Cambridge, Massachusetts, throughout, and its website says it also has a site in Boulder, Colorado, where Wikipedia says it was building chemistry facilities in 2019.

Two enzymes, an eye program and a reset.

Editas works with two CRISPR enzymes, Cas9 and Cas12a, which its website says have different editing and targeting abilities; Cas12a, also known as Cpf1, it explains, makes staggered cuts in DNA and can reach sequences Cas9 cannot.

Its first program targeted an inherited eye disease, Leber congenital amaurosis type 10. The work was partnered with Allergan, which held an option on that treatment, known as EDIT-101, and up to four others for eye diseases, BioPharma Dive reported in August 2020. In March 2020 doctors at the Casey Eye Institute in Portland, Oregon, gave a patient an injection into the eye carrying CRISPR instructions, in a study sponsored by Editas and Allergan; NPR reported at the time that it was the first attempt to use CRISPR to edit a gene while the DNA was still inside a person’s body. Enrollment in the study was paused soon afterwards because of the coronavirus pandemic, BioPharma Dive reported, before trial sites were cleared to resume. After AbbVie completed its purchase of Allergan in May 2020, AbbVie returned the rights to EDIT-101 and other eye programs to Editas three months later, BioPharma Dive reported. Editas deprioritised EDIT-101 in early 2023 and, BioPharma Dive reported in December 2024, never found a buyer for it.

The company then focused on blood disorders with an edited-cell treatment for sickle cell disease and beta thalassemia, later called reni-cel. On 12 December 2024 it discontinued that program after failing to find a partner and said it would cut about 180 positions, roughly two-thirds of its workforce, BioPharma Dive reported. The publication called it the second major research reset in the company’s eleven-year history. Chief executive Gilmore O’Neill, who took the post in June 2022 according to Wikipedia, said Editas was “transitioning to a fully in vivo company,” editing genes inside the body rather than in cells removed from it.

Leadership changed several times before that. Wikipedia lists Katrine Bosley as chief executive until 2019, followed by Cynthia Collins and then James Mullen, the former board chairman, before O’Neill’s appointment.

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.

From the eye to the liver.

Today Editas describes itself on its website as a gene editing company aiming to “discover, develop, manufacture, and commercialize” genomic medicines, under the line “Bold Science in Motion.” Its lead program is EDIT-401, an in vivo treatment it is developing for high cholesterol and atherosclerotic cardiovascular disease. On 8 October 2026 the company announced that it had received approval to begin a first-in-human clinical trial of EDIT-401, according to its newsroom, and in September 2026 it named Dan Ory as chief medical officer. These are investigational programs.

The company has also kept a foot in cancer research through partners. Its website lists work on alpha-beta T-cell medicines with Bristol Myers Squibb — a relationship that began, Wikipedia says, with a 2015 collaboration with Juno Therapeutics, later bought by Celgene and then by Bristol Myers Squibb — and gamma-delta T-cell medicines with Immatics.

Editas’s technology has also travelled. When Beam Therapeutics came out of stealth in 2018, MedCity News reported that it had licensing agreements with Editas Medicine for technologies Editas had licensed from Harvard, the Broad Institute and Massachusetts General Hospital. David Liu, one of Editas’s founders, is also a co-founder of Beam.

For a design guide, Editas Medicine shows how a science company’s name and story can stay steady through a change of scientific direction: the brand built on CRISPR in 2013 now presents itself around editing inside the body. Compare CRISPR Therapeutics, which BioPharma Dive named among the companies that followed Editas, and Beam Therapeutics. For this guide we use deep teal, sea glass and mist with a sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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