New Danforth spinoff Spearhead Bio Wants to Provide the Glue for Better Plant Gene Editing

The Danforth Technology Company announced the launch of a new startup.

The company, Spearhead Bio, is the third startup in three years to spin out from the Donald Danforth Plant Science Center, and aims to complement existing gene editing tools like CRISPR, which burst into the mainstream last decade. Spearhead Bio founder and chief scientific officer Keith Slotkin says CRISPR is like a really precise pair of scissors for gene editing.

“It’s a great tool,” he says. “But if you think about what you can do with a toolbox that only has a pair of scissors in it, it’s limited. You can make cuts, destroy, and rip apart things in the genome, but there’s not much you can produce just with a pair of scissors.”

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