Jul 26, 2022
My guest today is Rachel Haurwitz,
co-founder, President and CEO of Caribou Biosciences. Caribou is a
CRISPR genome editing company spun out of Jennifer Doudna’s lab at
the University of California, Berkeley.
In this episode of lab to startup, we will talk to Rachel about how
she built Caribou right after finishing her PhD in Jennifer
Doudna’s lab, and went all the way to taking the company public
last year in the midst of a pandemic. We will talk about how she
took a very nascent idea of CRISPR, built a team, raised funds,
built collaborations with big companies; and built this very
successful company that has recently reported phase I clinical
study results.
Shownotes
- Caribou
Biosciences
- Rachel founded Caribou Biosciences right out of grad school, as
Jennifer Doudna's first graduate student working on CRISPR
- chRDNA technology enhances the specificity of gene editing and at
multiple locations
- Targeting cancers- both liquid and solid tumors
- Autologous CAR T cell therapy is hard to scale
- Caribou is working on off the shelf cell therapies- Allogeneic
CAR T therapy
- Massive pivot as an organization- started as a pure platform
technology company to help other companies
- Found real opportunity to help patients directly by developing
therapeutics
- chRDNA has provided several orders of improvement in specificity-
no off target effects observed within the limits of
detection
- Phase I clinical trial ANTLER : https://clinicaltrials.gov/ct2/show/NCT04637763?term=cb-010&draw=2&rank=1
- The most important ingredient in building is not technology- it
is team!
- The first ten hires are the most terrifying hires for any
startup
- Analysis paralysis
- Incoming interest in technology and money came from Dupont
Pioneer and Novartis
- Raise more money than you need!
- Building the team and role played by Jennifer Doudna
- Lessons learnt from building and serving on boards
- Job
opportunities