Spearhead Bio secures NSF grant to test novel gene-editing approach in corn

Spearhead Bio, which emerged from stealth mode in May, announced Monday that it had received the NSF grant to test its novel method for editing plant genes. Founder and Chief Scientific Officer Keith Slotkin, PhD said the company builds on established gene-editing technologies used by other life sciences firms but introduces a unique feature: the use of "transposable elements" found in plant DNA.

The startup was launched by the Danforth Technology Corp. (DTC), a Danforth Center subsidiary that helps commercialize research from the center.

While other companies use gene editing to splice genetic material together, Spearhead’s technology uses transposable elements to target parts of a gene that naturally grow into a DNA sequence. This could make genetic fusion — and the resulting stronger crop varieties — a more natural process.

"These are pieces of DNA that naturally evolved to glue themselves into DNA, into genomes," Slotkin said Monday. "And so, by combining these together, now, we have a improved toolbox for editing genomes. ... It has the scissors of CRISPR/Cas, but it now has this added tool of glue, of the transposable elements. Now we can start to really rearrange pieces of DNA in custom ways." CRISPR/Cas involves the use of a CRISPR (clustered regularly interspaced short palindromic repeats) array and Cas proteins, which act as molecular "scissors" to cut DNA.

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