Chroma Medicine, a genomic medicine company pioneering single-course epigenetic editing therapeutics, today announced it has entered into an exclusive license agreement with the Whitehead Institute to access intellectual property and technology developed in the lab of Chroma co-founder Jonathan Weissman, Ph.D., formerly of UCSF.
The novel technology called CHARM (coupled histone tail for autoinhibition release of methyltransferase) uses a compact epigenetic editing effector domain to recruit and activate endogenous DNA methyltransferases to durably silence target genes. CHARM can utilize a self-silencing mechanism to limit its duration of expression and has been shown by Dr. Weissman’s lab to induce brain-wide prion protein silencing in vivo.
We congratulate both Jonathan Weissman and Luke Gilbert, who are the lead UCSF inventors.