In this Market Foolery segment, host Chris Hill and Motley Fool Rule Breakers' Aaron Bush talk about where genetic engineering is heading -- which is out of the lab and toward really curing diseases. Yes, it's early days. But the potential for CRISPR could be enormous. But there are some interesting speedbumps involved for biotech investors. <\/p>\n
A full transcript follows the video. <\/p>\n
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This video was recorded on July 11, 2017. <\/p>\n
Chris Hill:Every once in awhile,I like to walk by your desk and ask you, \"Whatare you working on right now? What's something that's caught your interest?\" And you had brought up this,[laughs] frankly,you brought up a word I had never heard before, and that is CRISPR. I should say, anacronym I'd never seen before. CRISPR stands for --stick with me, folks -- clusteredregularly interspacedshort palindromic repeats. Let's do this again, shall we? CRISPR:clustered regularly interspacedshort palindromicrepeats, which isessentially a very fancy way of referring to biotech engineering. <\/p>\n
Theanalogy that our colleague Michael Douglass mentioned to me, and also appearedin the article I read is that,imagine a DNA strand,and you have this microscopic pair of scissors, and it enables you to snip out one little piece of the DNA,and you can do any number of things with that,depending on which DNA we're talking about. Thispotentially has ramifications for food supply, for disease, formedicines, for treatments, all that sort of thing. Tell mewhere this space is right now, andwhat you're watching when it comes to this space. Biotech engineering has been, I would say, maybe not at the forefront of the news,but certainly 15 years ago or so, when we were going to sequence the human genome, whatthat was such a dominant story, I think since then, this is an industry that investors haveat least had on their radarto some degree or another. <\/p>\n
Aaron Bush: Right.I think it's still new enough tonot be super relevant for investors. Butevery day or week that passes by, itbecomes slightly morerelevant. I think for the most part, theprogress has been mostly restricted to labs,getting the fundamental technology itself to work,where you can actually change the genes in whatever creature. But,it is starting to move out more into the mainstream,and it's starting to become more relevant andcreating cures for diseases andactually doing things with it. In my opinion, it'skind of like a big idea at this point. There isn't a lot to back it up. But,if you do play it forward, it is one of those really big ideas. It'sprobably on parwith augmented reality, or machine learning, or cryptocurrencies, even, that can just disrupt the way that things are done at a fundamental level. So, I'm excited to see where it runs. But it'sstill definitely the early days. <\/p>\n
Hill: And that wasanother thing Michael Douglass mentions. He said, \"This is super early stage,\" and there are pure-playcompanies out there, one of which wassmart enough to get the nameCRISPR Therapeutics(NASDAQ: CRSP), so kudos towhoever nailed that one. But,you were saying before we started taping that there's a move right now to create a patent pool, because you could see where, for some companies,this could become incredibly lucrative. You could also see a situation where --and it sounds like this is maybepart of what is driving the move toward a patent pool --everything could just get tangled up in legal \"he-said, she-said, that's my patent\" stuff. <\/p>\n
Bush: Right. One of the main blockers to the development of CRISPR is an ongoing fight over patent rights.I think we're at thepoint where things are getting slowand getting caught up legally. As you can imagine,there are several universities, labs,biotech companies justclamoring over this, trying to pile onas quickly as possible, because it is going to beone of the next big things. And right now,there are a few exclusive licensesthat are probably too broad in the market, and should probably be re-evaluated so that there aren't specific gatekeepers to the technology. So, yeah, this needs to form a patent pool and simplify thelicensing process, could ease that patent logjam and really helpaccelerate CRISPR's developmentacross everything, across the entire space. So, right now,this is still at the proposal level, andI don't know how quickly that's going to move,because there are a lot of players here. There's still negotiation to be done, but ifthe negotiations go well,I think this could start to become much more relevant for investors sooner. Andsomething with the biotech space in general is, you do need to invest early to get the big results. And if you wait until there's a drug on the market that works, you just missed a several-billion-dollar run-up. So, it isimportant to be watching these early moves. Andseeing how all the different players, theEditas, the CRISPRTherapeutics, and others, howthey're going to shake out in this patent pool issue. <\/p>\n
Hill: It sounds like, as investors, we should be rooting for the patent pool to come to fruition, because that's going toaccelerate the process, instead of being --and I'm just pulling these numbers out of thin air -- 10 years away fromtreatments being on the market, we are five to seven years away. <\/p>\n
Bush: Yeah.I think it's hard to put specific numbers on it, but yes,that's definitely the idea. It'll allow companies tomore quickly start building their owntechnologies and their own patents on top of a larger pool that's available to everyone. <\/p>\n
Hill: To make this both more real and more fun, oneexample that I dug upwhen I was clicking around this morning, anarticle from Scientific American --which is six years old, by the way. I'm angry that no one in my life flagged this article for me. It was basically how researchers took thefluorescent proteins that appear injellyfish genes andinserted them into a common household cat. And so, boom,glow-in-the-dark cat. I mean,who's not excited about that? <\/p>\n
Bush: What elsecan you ask for? <\/p>\n
Hill: Actually,our man behind the glass, Dan Boyd,when I mentioned that to him, he was like, \"No.I have no interest in a glow-in-the-dark cat, they'reenough trouble as they are at nighttime. Add theglow-in-the-dark feature and that'snot sweetening the deal for me.\" Reallyinteresting stuff. Definitely something to keep an eye on. <\/p>\n
Aaron Bush has no position in any stocks mentioned. Chris Hill has no position in any stocks mentioned. The Motley Fool has no position in any of the stocks mentioned. The Motley Fool has a disclosure policy. <\/p>\n
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This Is Why Investors Will Need to Learn a New Acronym: CRISPR - Madison.com<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" In this Market Foolery segment, host Chris Hill and Motley Fool Rule Breakers' Aaron Bush talk about where genetic engineering is heading -- which is out of the lab and toward really curing diseases. Yes, it's early days. Continue reading