, said it will work with Ionis Pharmaceuticals Inc. initially to develop up to four targets for gene editing.
The initial focus will be metabolic diseases where the liver can be used to deliver treatments, said Thomas, Metagenomi's CEO, but the partners aren't disclosing their exact disease targets. RNA therapies — targeting the ribonucleic acid that carries protein-encoding instruction from DNA — have been the focus of Ionis for three decades, but Metagenomi's root over its four years has been finding microbes that nature has evolved into the most-efficient tools for biological editing. Its core is metagenomics, the study of genetic material recovered directly from dirt and other environmental samples.
That's where Metagenomi comes into play with its library of enzymes plucked from nature that have evolved over 4 billion years to do all the gene-editing tricks.