Coinbase CEO Brian Armstrong Eyes Embryo-Editing Startup

Coinbase CEO Brian Armstrong declared his interest in creating a startup to work on gene-editing embryos, a type of editing that people say will lead to the creation of “designer babies.” CRISPR (Clustered Regularly Interspaced Short Palindromic Repeats) technology has been used in the medical field to help with certain conditions, and recently, a baby diagnosed with a rare urea cycle disorder received personalized CRISPR gene-editing therapy. HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. praised the medical achievement and the work of medical researchers to provide the baby with a second chance at life.

Armstrong said in an X post that he is looking for gene editing scientists or comp bio/ML engineers to join him at a dinner in the Bay Area to discuss the possibility of creating a startup related to embryo editing. “I think the time is right for the defining company in the US to be built in this area, approaching it in a scientifically rigorous way, solving an unmet need,” Armstrong wrote. “About 400m people live with a genetic disease today, and this technology can have a huge impact on human health if done correctly.”

Armstrong included a statistics graphic from the Pew Research Center in which 72% of survey respondents believe that treating a disease/condition a baby would have at birth is an appropriate use of gene-editing technology. 60% find it appropriate to use gene-editing technology to “reduce the risk of a serious disease that could occur over their lifetime.” 19% of survey respondents also find it appropriate to use this technology to “make the baby more intelligent.”

Embryo research is legal, but implanting gene-edited embryos is strictly regulated in the United States by the FDA. The Dickey-Wicker Amendment bans federal funding for research involving the creation or modification of human embryos for implantation. Furthermore, the Consolidated Appropriations Act in 2016 states that the FDA cannot “review or approve an application” in which “a human embryo is intentionally created or modified to include a heritable genetic modification.”

Chinese scientist He Jiankui was sentenced to three years in jail after he misled doctors into implanting gene-edited embryos into two women in 2018. He was found to deliberately violate biomedical research regulations and medical ethics. A mother gave birth to twins in November 2018 after the implantation of Jiankui’s gene-edited embryos. In addition to a three-year prison sentence, Jiankui was fined the equivalent of $429,000.

Specifically, Jiankui edited the embryos to make them immune to HIV, which resulted in backlash and criticism from scientists who believe there are safer ways to prevent HIV infection.

NPR reported in 2023 that Jiankui has begun researching gene-editing therapies for Duchenne muscular dystrophy while using CRISPR technology following his release from prison. Jiankui was also banned from future scientific work regarding assisted human reproductive technology. NPR asked Jiankui if he learned anything from his illegal research on gene-edited babies and Jiankui said he “did it too fast.”

NPR asked Jiankui about the status of the gene-edited babies who were born in 2018. He said, “Well, what I can tell is they are living a normal, peaceful, nondisturbed life.” Jiankui declined to comment about whether there were negative effects to his gene editing experiment. He said it is important for people to know in the future, but not now.

Multiple studies have found chromosomal abnormalities that occurred as a result of CRISPR embryo editing. One study removed the POU5F1 gene in 18 embryos and found eight of the embryos had abnormalities, including four with “substantial DNA rearrangements and deletions of several thousand base pairs.”

A second study involved modifying embryos with a blindness-causing mutation in the EYS gene. There were large chunks of the chromosome missing in about half of the 23 embryos, and some cases of the chromosome disappearing.

Fyodor Urnov, a CRISPR researcher at the University of California, told OneZero, “There’s no sugarcoating this. This is a restraining order for all genome editors to stay the living daylights away from embryo editing.”

CRISPR technology is lauded by some scientists and health officials for its potential to provide personalized therapies for severe genetic disorders. However, the same unintended consequences found in CRISPR embryo editing experiments have been found with gene-edited plants, a new class of genetically modified organisms (GMOs).

The HighWire reported about the deregulation of CRISPR technology in agriculture in 2023 and spoke with Dr. Michael Antoniou, a professor in Molecular Genetics at Kings College in London. Dr. Antoniou said, “The gene editing process as a whole (plant tissue culture, plant cell transformation, gene editing tool action) will inevitably result in hundreds if not thousands of sites of random unintended DNA damage leading to large scale alterations in gene expression patterns. This, in turn, can result in altered biochemistry and composition that could include the production of novel toxins and allergens. This contrasts with the genetic variation that results from natural breeding, which, contrary to the narrative spread by advocates of gene editing deregulation, results in far fewer sites of DNA change in a non-random manner.”

In November, the USDA approved the deregulation of a new class of GMOs with new gene-editing technologies, including CRISPR. The agency is allowing plants with up to 12 genetic modifications to bypass regulatory oversight if these modifications could theoretically be achieved through conventional breeding methods.