CRISPR scientists are teaming up with a pharma giant to look for new drug clues

GlaxoSmithKline will pour $67 million into a new laboratory at the University of California to industrialize the search for drug clues using CRISPR.

Unpicking the genome: The idea is to use CRISPR on cells growing in the lab, tweaking all 20,000 or so human genes and watching what happens. Are there special combinations that kill cancer, for example? Machine learning software will make sense of the data, as will clues from large biobanks that contain people’s health records.

Who will be in charge? Hmm, tricky one, that. The new center has the backing of CRISPR experts Jennifer Doudna of UC Berkeley and Jonathan Weissman of UC San Francisco, with 24 university employees and 14 from the company. But Glaxo will pay the tab, so it will have a say in what research is done, and the option to license patents on discoveries or new technologies.

— Antonio Regalad