Genome editing startup Beam Therapeutics was already trying to go public in a tough market for biotech companies. This week brought a new complication: explaining to potential investors why your co-founder just launched a rival startup.
Beam is based on a newfangled approach to CRISPR called base editing, invented by Broad Institute researcher David Liu, that allows scientists to change individual letters of DNA. The two-year-old company, which counts Liu as a co-founder, filed to raise $100 million in an initial public offering in September.
It seems to me that David Liu is severely lacking in ethics. It seems to me that greed is the only explanation as to why he thought it better to launch two companies. 🙄