Benjamin Oakes

The gene-editing tool CRISPR has revolutionized research, but so far it’s been hard to use it to treat disease—it’s proved difficult to make the treatments specific enough to be fully safe, and delivering the therapy inside the body has also been complicated. As CEO of Scribe Therapeutics, Benjamin Oakes, 33, is working to optimize novel CRISPR enzymes and ways to package the gene-editing systems to solve those problems. “Our engineered gene editors are more active and create more productive edits, are enhanced to more specifically target any part of the genome, and are more compact,” Oakes says. All that makes it possible to target the underpinnings of many more diseases.