The Age of CRISPR: Engineering the Future of Genetic Medicine | Benjamin Oakes | TEDxBerkeley

Dr. Benjamin Oakes delves into the fascinating potential of CRISPR technology and its ability to transform healthcare as we know it. Benjamin Oakes, Ph.D., is co-founder and CEO of Scribe Therapeutics, a genetic medicines company unlocking the potential of CRISPR to transform human health. Previously, Dr. Oakes was an Innovative Genomics Institute Entrepreneurial Fellow and received a Ph.D. in Molecular and Cellular Biology from the University of California, Berkeley. He worked in the lab of Nobel Laureate, CRISPR co-inventor, and Scribe co-founder Jennifer Doudna, where he developed new CRISPR-Cas9 molecules with enhanced characteristics. Dr. Oakes and his Scribe team pioneered CRISPR by Design™, a data-driven design and engineering process, to enable a new era of in vivo CRISPR-based standard of care treatments for patients with highly prevalent diseases. They are leveraging the power of comprehensive molecular engineering to create new genetic medicines on two proprietary platforms, X-Editor for gene editing and ELXR for epigenetic editing. Dr. Oakes has contributed to dozens of publications and patent applications and was named to the MIT Technology Review 35 Innovators Under 35, San Francisco Business Times 40 Under 40, Endpoints 20 Under 40 in Biopharma, Business Insider 30 Under 40 Transforming Healthcare. Prior to his Ph.D. Dr. Oakes received his B.A. in the fields of Philosophy and Neurobiology and worked as a researcher building tens of thousands of “version one” genome editing tools, providing an open-source framework for scientists and medical professionals to modify the genome B.C. — before CRISPR. This talk was given at a TEDx event using the TED conference format but independently organized by a local community. Learn more at https://www.ted.com/tedx