Meet the CRISPR Pioneers Who Are Making Gene Editing Easy
Inscripta’s Onyx — a “labtop” gene editor — could democratize an array of breakthroughs promised by CRISPR technology
By Ruth Reader
Henry Ford is still best known for his 1908 Model T, an inexpensive automobile that almost anyone could own. But his real innovation was integrating the conveyor belt into assembly line production. The inspiration came from the meat packing industry. There, factory workers bled, skinned, and sliced ugly carcasses into smooth chops and filets. Ford adapted the process for cars. With the conveyor belt, he took Model T production from a 12 hour process down to roughly 90 minutes. The efficiency allowed Ford to drop the price of his Model T and led to incredible sales. It also sparked a revolution involving industrial production of all sorts.
In the 2019 documentary Human Nature, Stanford law professor Hank Greely asserts that CRISPR is the biotech industry’s Model T. If that’s true, a startup called Inscripta is rolling out an automated assembly line for the bioscience era. The biotechnology company is launching Onyx, a compact gene editor that can make thousands of changes to genomes in millions of cells for $347,000. The initial device will edit yeast and E Coli, but it eventually promises…
