With Editas Medicine’s recent SEC filing (Ticker Symbol EDIT), their stock became available as the first IPO of 2016 closing at $16 per share and valuing their opening at $94.4 million, around $6 million shy of the amount they proposed raising initially. Over the first two weeks in February the stock dropped in price to below $13 and closed on Thursday Feb 11th still below the IPO price at $15.77, though up a little more than 20% from the day before. That the Nasdaq Biotechnology Index (NBI) has dropped almost 30% in the first two months of 2016 could assuage some of the fears of Editas investors, indicating that their price drop might not be related to the company at all but instead to larger market trends. The three other IPOs so far this year have all been biotech companies and have all also suffered a little, AveXis, another gene therapy company, Proteostasis, who are developing a treatment for cystic fibrosis and BeiGene, a cancer therapies company, are all down. In fact, that Editas has been fighting against the market trend and returning to near its IPO price is a good indication that the company is viewed favorably by investors.

Editas Medicine is not the only CRISPR company, they are just the only public CRISPR company.

Intellia Therapeutics which has raised around $85 million in funding has yet to file for an IPO though that may change. Editas and Intellia have been rivals since the companies were created. Jennifer Doudna, initially a cofounder of Editas, left around the time that the Broad Institute and Feng Zhang, another Editas founder, received a patent for therapeutic use of CRISPR that did not include Doudna. Since then there have been claims and counter-claims as to who was the first to use it, Doudna or Zhang. Culminating recently with a request to reexamine the patent to Zhang et al. by Doudna’s University of California Berkeley and others.The IPO of Editas came as a shock to some due to how early it was in the company’s history, just two years. However, they have things going in their favor at the moment, they have not lost their patent yet and they have much more money now than Intellia and thus one would presume a head-start on reaching the market first. So where does that leave Intellia therapeutics? In second place? Or is there enough room for both of them?In their SEC filing, Editas states that their research focus will be on Leber Congenital Amaurosis(LCA) type 10, a genetic disease that causes blindness. Treating LCA using gene therapy has been studied and performed for over 7 years using non-CRISPR based methods, establishing the treatment as viable. However, the disease is suggested to affect about 1 in 50,000 to 1 in 100,000 births meaning only around 3,000 individuals in the US suffer from this disease, not making it any less important but making the drug market extremely small. Either Editas is deceiving us that LCA will be their main focus or they are wary of the pushback they will receive from regulators and society and so are trying to make CRISPR therapies mainstream by picking so called fruit that has already dropped from the tree.Intellia Therapeutics has taken another route. Instead of trying to use CRISPR technology directly on patients they are focusing on editing cancer killing T-cells outside of the body and then introducing them back in, so called CAR-T cell therapy. This technique has also shown much success but has been limited in scope by the available genetic engineering technologies, specifically TALENs. The discovery of CRISPR has decreased the workload and timescale in which it takes to genetically engineer new CAR-T cells, making this therapy now more broadly applicable.Will we soon see an IPO by Intellia? It is unclear. Editas has indicated that money from their IPO would be used to help fund clinical trials, something that Intellia partnership with Novartis might abrogate. With the patent battle occurring between Intellia’s founders and Editas founders maybe an Intellia IPO would mean something more than money and maybe that contributed to Editas’ motivation to file so soon for an IPO. This could also be a cause of concern, if Intellia doesn’t go public till after a patent decision is made and the decision is not in their favor it could significantly affect the amount of money that they raise. Though I am not expecting it, I wouldn’t be surprised if in the next few months Intellia also files for an IPO.