"The greater China region has very specific health care needs, and we are intentionally building Brii Bio to address those needs through a mutually beneficial partnership model that provides positive impact on patient health and growth opportunities for our partners. Most significantly, the collaborations announced today catapult us to a leading position in the race to deliver a functional cure for chronic hepatitis B infection in China, where the disease is a significant public health issue and silent epidemic affecting more than 90 million citizens. Our research for novel immune therapies in China is specifically intended to address diseases prevalent in the region."
Zhi Hong, co-founder and CEO of Brii Bio, which entered two partnerships with VBI Vaccines Ltd. and Vir Biotechnology Inc. focused on hepatitis B virus infection

"With CRISPR, you can turn off every single gene and see what happens. It identifies targets with more accuracy, and you can layer biology on top and combine CRISPR screens and drug screening to find which combination best kills cancer cells."
Ultan McDermott, chief scientist in oncology at Astrazeneca plc's IMED discovery and early development unit in Cambridge, U.K., which has formed functional genomics collaborations with Cancer Research UK and the Sanger gene sequencing center to apply CRISPR gene editing to target discovery and validation

"We're taking unactionable mutations and rendering them actionable – that for us is the guiding principle."
David Epstein, CEO and co-founder, Black Diamond Therapeutics Inc., which raised $20 million in a series A round to progress a novel platform for tackling a category of cancers that earlier generations of targeted therapies have failed to address

"Centyrins were designed and conceived from the start with properties that were differentiated from antibodies so that we could address targets in a way that has not been done previously. We can link Centyrins together and modulate cell surface receptors in unique ways for more complex disease targets."
Karyn O'Neil, chief scientific officer, Aro Biotherapeutics Co.