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G+FLAS Life Sciences Acquired Patent for New Types of CRISPR

  • Wednesday, March 11, 2020, 1:10 pm
  • ACROFAN=Seunghee Shin
  • seunghee.shin@acrofan.com
G+FLAS Life Sciences Co., Ltd. (CEO Sunghwa Choe), a biotech startup company in Korea, announced that it obtained a patent for new materials related to CRISPR. The company is then speeding up the development of gene therapy products and new varieties.

G+FLAS Life Sciences is committed to developing related products such as anti-cancer drugs based on the third-generation genetic scissors technology, CRISPR(Clustered Regularly Interspaced Short Palindromic Repeats). CRISPR is used to recognize specific sequences of human and animal cells as well as microorganisms, and to precisely cut the DNA of the site. When DNA is cleaved, abnormal genes in the cell are corrected to normal, or induced by malfunctioning mutations through their repairing process.

The patented materials are two types of CRISPR-related protein, "Cas12a". "Cas12a" has a function of cutting double helix DNA just like "Cas9", the most commonly used CRISPR. On top of that, "Cas12a" has the advantage of correcting the target sequence more accurately. G+FLAS Life Sciences also laid the foundation for mass production of highly functional enzymes by optimizing protein sequences to improve separation and purification efficiency in the industrial production of "Cas12a" protein.

The bioinformatics team in G+FLAS Life Sciences selected candidates for high-performance putative genetic scissors from the tens of thousands of candidates loaded into the microbial metagenome database to discover "Cas12a". Candidate genes were successfully expressed after the protein was reconstituted to facilitate the expression of E. coli. The isolated and purified genetic scissors have demonstrated excellent functionality in animal and plant cells after being combined with the CRISPR RNA and primarily verified functionality under vitroconditions.

G+FLAS Life Sciences applied for a trademark by designating "Cas12a", which is a 3.5th generation genetic scissors with sophisticated genetic correction, as "gfCAS12a". In the future, the company plans to use it widely for developing ▲bio-new drugs such as gene therapy, ▲varietal improvement for producing high value-added agricultural products, ▲researching anti-cancer drugs with CRISPR, and ▲exporting technology.

G+FLAS Life Sciences expects that the new genetic scissors technology and a plant-based biologics production platform will create outstanding synergies. The company is using its genetic scissors technology to correct sugar chain transferase of protein in host plants and developing humanized plants that simulate human systems to put in the protein production. Protein medicines produced by humanized plants are very similar to the structure of protein sugar chains produced in the human body, and therefore have low toxicity and excellent efficacy.

"There are few companies around the world which have found new CRISPR technology among the numerous genetic scissors sequences that exist in the bigdata form in the life information database. This patent acquisition is presenting the differentiated technology of G+FLAS Life Sciences. In the future, we will focus on developing the next generation genome editing system so that G+FLAS Life Sciences and bio-industry of Korea can lead the world's genetic engineering market," said Sunghwa Choe, CEO of G+FLAS Life Sciences.