Prime Medicine

Prime Medicine, Inc. was founded in 2019, developed in the lab of David Liu, PhD, a founder of the company, and funded by several prominent investors. Prime Medicine aspires to change the practice of medicine by curing diseases through the advancement of a new genome-editing approach called "prime editing," an innovative technology that enables highly flexible rewriting of DNA sequences. It is a versatile and precise genome editing method that can make nearly any local alteration to precisely-targeted DNA sequences and has the potential to correct almost all disease-causing mutations.

Engineered prime editors are modified Cas9 proteins coupled to reverse transcriptases. Prime editors use a new type of engineered guide RNA, called a pegRNA, that directs them to target DNA and also encodes the desired DNA edit. At the target DNA site, the modified Cas9 cuts one strand of the DNA, which the molecular complex uses to "prime," or initiate, the reverse transcription of the edited genetic information carried by the pegRNA directly into the genome.