Shares of companies across the emerging field of gene editing fell Tuesday morning as one of the more prominent players said its chief executive would leave the firm.
Cambridge, Massachusetts-based Editas Medicine said Tuesday morning that Katrine Bosley would step down from her dual role as president and CEO of the company, effective March 1. Board member Cynthia Collins – previously CEO of Human Longevity – will serve as interim CEO. Bosley also resigned from the company’s board of directors.
Editas’s stock fell more than 20 percent on the Nasdaq Tuesday morning following the announcement. The news dragged other gene-editing shares down as well. Switzerland-based Crispr Therapeutics’ shares, which also trade on the Nasdaq, fell more than 13 percent, while Cambridge-based Intellia Therapeutics’ shares fell 11 percent.
“Under [Bosley’s] leadership, the company achieved significant growth, hitting key milestones in the EDIT-101 clinical program and developing the company’s transformative engineered cell medicines,” Editas board Chairman James Mullen said in a statement. “She has helped establish Editas Medicine as a leading genome editing company with a strong foundation, well-positioned to achieve its long-term goals and deliver the potential of genome editing to patients around the world.”
EDIT-101, which the company has partnered with Allergan, is an in vivo CRISPR-based medicine for Leber congenital amaurosis type 10, or LCA10, a genetic form of blindness. The Food and Drug Administration accepted Editas’s Investigational New Drug application for the drug in November, and on Monday the company announced the publication in Nature of preclinical data supporting its development. Crispr Therapeutics is partnered with Vertex Pharmaceuticals for the development of another CRISPR-based medicine, CTX001 for sickle cell disease, which is in a Phase I/II study. However, CTX001 is an ex vivo therapy.
Despite the stock market slump, however, Cowen analysts Phil Nadeau and Joseph Thome maintained a positive view of the company, noting that patient dosing in the EDIT-101 program remains on track for the second half of the year. Thus, the idea behind her departure, they wrote, was to bring in a CEO with more product development experience as the company’s focus has now moved away from being primarily scientific.
A Deep-dive Into Specialty Pharma
A specialty drug is a class of prescription medications used to treat complex, chronic or rare medical conditions. Although this classification was originally intended to define the treatment of rare, also termed “orphan” diseases, affecting fewer than 200,000 people in the US, more recently, specialty drugs have emerged as the cornerstone of treatment for chronic and complex diseases such as cancer, autoimmune conditions, diabetes, hepatitis C, and HIV/AIDS.
Photo: Getty Images
