Vertex to pay Editas Medicine for use of CRISPR genome editing tool

For a decade, leading academic institutes and their associated companies fought a bruising, headline-grabbing fight over who held patent rights to CRISPR-Cas9, the revolutionary genome editing tool. Editas Medicine, the winner of that battle in the United States, will now cash in. Vertex Pharmaceuticals and Editas announced Wednesday that Vertex will pay Editas $50 million, along with a series of annual payments through 2034, in exchange for rights to use CRISPR-Cas9 in Casgevy, the sickle cell therapy approved recently. The resolution will allow Casgevy, which appears curative for many patients with the lifethreatening disease, to reach the market without any legal challenge. It is in line with how many observers expected the dispute to end, with money changing hands between companies, rather than a court preventing drug makers from selling approved medicines. For Vertex, a $90 billion company with other blockbuster medicines, the deal will amount to a small fraction of the profits it and its partner CRISPR Therapeutics are expected to take in from Casgevy. For Editas, however, the money can provide a lifeline as the biotech tries to rebuild itself. Although it was among the first crop of CRISPR companies founded around 2013, alongside CRISPR Therapeutics and Intellia Therapeutics, the company struggled to execute. Its first clinical program failed and it saw repeated leadership turnover. The new funds will now extend Editas’s cash runway into 2026, a useful bridge as it looks to get its own sickle cell therapy approved and bring forward nascent programs. In addition to the $50 million upfront payment, Editas can also receive another “contingent” $50 million upfront payment. It is then entitled to annual payments worth between $10 million and $40 million until 2034, depending on how well Casgevy sells. Editas will then pay the Broad Institute and Harvard University “mid-double-digit” royalties on the payments it receives from Vertex, according to an SEC filing. Editas spun off from Harvard and the Broad, where Feng Zhang conducted some of the first work showing that CRISPR could work in human cells.