Code Breakers

A Better Editor

When serial entrepreneur Rom Kshuk first met Bar-Ilan geneticist Prof. Ayal Hendel of the Mina and Everard Goodman Faculty of Life Sciences, it’s fair to say he was a good judge of the potential of the latter’s technology. The CEO of a number successful bio- and agri-tech companies—including the former Future Meat, a world leader in the production of cultured-meat technologies—Kshuk recognized that Hendel’s approach to CRISPR genome-editing optimization could drive forward clinical gene-editing therapies. But no less important in convincing him and his fellow entrepreneur, the ex-Meta research scientist Yaniv Shmueli, that Hendel was the right CSO for their next company were “his entrepreneurial qualities,” Kshuk says. “Apart from being a scientist of the first order, Ayal was also fearless and incredibly diligent. We knew he would be willing to take the right risks, and also demonstrate the patience and flexibility required to bring his technology to market.”

Six months later, UnBox Venture’s CEO Ariel Sella agreed with that assessment when he offered to make the venture studio—a partnership of Bar-Ilan and Mivtach Shamir Technologies, a leading Israeli holding and investment firm—one of the startup’s first investors, providing pre-seed funding and a residency at the UnBox center on Bar-Ilan’s campus. Called Cassidy Bio, the startup applied Shmueli’s expertise in large language models to the challenge of devising better CRISPR “guide RNA,” or the RNA that guides CRISPR Cas-proteins to the right place on the target DNA. There, the proteins bind to the double strand and cut it, effectively shutting off the problematic gene. “Think of it as a kind of Chat GPT, but instead of generating answers based on large amounts of text data, our technology generates predictions based on the human genetic code,” explains Kshuk. These predictions, which Hendel develops into platforms for optimizing a pharmaceutical company’s guide RNA, aim to make gene-editing therapies safer, more efficient, and more stable—and hence, a common modality.