On Oct. 19, I reviewed three of the 10 companies a Jeffries health care analyst thinks are most likely to be acquired by members of Big Pharma. Now let's look at numbers four through six on the list Jeffries' Jaret Holtz provided to FierceBiotech.

Bluebird Bio Inc. (BLUE) - Cambridge, Massachusetts

A logical acquirer is Bristol-Myers Squibb Co. (BMY) given the two already have an agreement on a Bluebird cancer drug, which Bristol obtained as part of its takeover of Celgene. The agreement was recently modified when Bristol gave Bluebird $200 million to beef up its manufacturing in exchange

Gene-editing stocks may soon take a leap forward with the discovery of what is being billed as a one-size-fits-all DNA lock.

The three pure-play CRISPR stocks have been on the decline since early 2018. Shares of Intellia Therapeutics (NTLA), Editas Medicine (EDIT) and leader CRISPR Therapeutics (CRSP) have magnified the declines of the broader stock indexes late last year. This is typical for a brand new speculative industry that is still trying to find its footing and is a long way from any sort of stable revenue. Still, two out of the three, CRISPR and Editas, remain significantly higher than

Genetic disorders are quite a daunting disease group to treat, but there is one major overlooked advantage in developing treatments for this disease group over others. Genetic diseases can be screened for in utero. So what? Thanks to new research published in the journal Nature Medicine, we know that they can be treated in utero as well.

This could have profound implications for the CRISPR gene-editing investment space, because it could change the regulatory landscape for the whole CRISPR approach to treatment. For better or for worse, fetuses do not have the same rights as those already born, and

Could the CRISPR-cas9 gene-editing system be the key to a cure for amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS)? A new paper written by a group of Stanford graduate students and just published in the journal Nature Genetics suggests a very hopeful maybe. Here’s the background.

Back in 2011, a paper was published delineating the cause of ALS, at least in a group of families with a proven autosomal dominant genetic feature. The cause in these cases is a repeating series of six nucleotides in a gene called C9orf72. It’s sort of like a broken record in the gene, or a

The CRISPR-cas9 gene editing technique is one of the most exciting advances in genomics since Watson and Crick discovered the chemical structure of DNA in 1953. Basically, it allows the selective editing of genes, potentially allowing humans to fix errors that cause genetic diseases and any other number of science fiction-like applications.

The main problem is CRISPR can cause mistakes in DNA after the cut strands are excised and the rest glued back together. This can lead to transcription problems, causing unforeseeable issues. That makes it very scary to apply for practical purposes because new errors can cause worse problems