John Zuris is the Director of Delivery and Editing Technologies at Editas Medicine, a leading genome editing company focused on using the power of CRISPR-Cas technology to hopefully provide one-time curative treatments to patients with serious genetic diseases. John brings 12 years of experience with CRISPR gene editing between his work in industry and academia. At Editas, his focus has been on advancing the company’s gene editing platform. John co-led development of an engineered Cas12a nuclease capable editing at high efficiency and specificity across gene targets and cell types. This engineered Cas12a nuclease is being used in the clinic for EDIT-301, an experimental autologous hematopoietic stem cell treatment for patients with Sickle Cell Disease or Beta-thalassemia, with strong clinical data to date.

John recently led development of a technology for efficient targeted transgene insertion technology called SLEEK, which stands for SeLection by Essential-gene Exon Knock-in. SLEEK can achieve nearly 100% knock-in of both simple and complex transgene cargos across many clinically relevant cell types and therefore may have broad applicability across the cell therapy space. The SLEEK technology was recently licensed to Shoreline Biosciences for use in engineering iPSC-derived NK cell and macrophage cell-based therapies. John’s current focus is now aimed at achieving efficient extrahepatic delivery and gene editing in vivo.

Prior to Editas, John completed his postdoctoral training under Dr. David Liu at Harvard University and the Broad Institute where he developed a lipid nanoparticle delivery system for CRISPR-Cas9 which enabled efficient genome editing in both ex vivo and in vivo applications. He was also involved in early development of base editing technology. John received his PhD from UC San Diego under Dr. Patricia Jennings where he first developed a passion for protein engineering that enabled his later success in the gene editing space.

www.editasmedicine.com