Last month, as he announced the launch, he said that Preventive has raised almost $30 million from private funding.
The funding is reportedly coming from some heavy hitters in the tech world, including OpenAI CEO Sam Altman and his husband Oliver Mulherin.
Harrington also said his team included leading experts in the fields of reproductive technology, reproductive medicine and genome-editing.
“Our goal is straightforward,” he wrote, “to determine through rigorous preclinical work whether preventive gene editing can be developed safely to spare families from severe disease.”
Harrington acknowledged the major ethical concerns around the science and the gray areas in the regulatory process, which he said, have opened the field to potentially detrimental outcomes.
“The combination of limited expert involvement and lack of a clear regulatory pathway has created conditions for fringe groups to take dangerous shortcuts that could harm patients and stifle responsible investigation,” the researchers said, adding, “Given that this technology has the potential to save millions of lives, we do not want this to happen.”
Gene editing can only be used in in vitro fertilization to allow for the first step of genetic testing on an embryo.
“It requires IVF because you have to have the embryo in a dish,” explained Stanford law professor Henry (Hank) Greely, a leading expert on ethical, legal, and social implications in bioscience technologies.
Once a test determines an embryo has the DNA makeup of a genetic disease, for example, like Huntington’s or cystic fibrosis, scientists would then use the DNA editing technique known as Clustered Regularly Interspaced Short Palindromic Repeats, or CRISPR, to make alterations to the DNA.
Hellbound and Down 