Dr. Andrew Anzalone, head of the Prime Editing Platform and scientific co-founder at Prime Medicine, is the winner of the PEGS Boston 2023 Young Scientist Keynote. He was invited to sit down with Brandon DeKosky, assistant professor of chemical engineering at MIT, to discuss prime editing and its precision in treating inherited genetic mutations. Anzalone outlines the next generation tool’s advantages over traditional CRISPR methods and the mechanism creating fewer gene editing errors. He also discusses his clinical training and background, the ongoing projects at Prime Medicine in engineering proteins for cell-based therapeutics, and his thoughts on the current challenges and future developments in gene editing and precision medicine.

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Andrew V. Anzalone, MD, PhD, Head of the Prime Editing Platform and Scientific Co-Founder, Prime Medicine
Andrew Anzalone is head of the prime editing platform at Prime Medicine, where he currently leads efforts to advance prime editing technologies for human therapeutic applications. Before joining Prime Medicine, Dr. Anzalone was a Jane Coffin Childs Memorial Fund Postdoctoral Fellow in the laboratory of David R. Liu at the Broad Institute of Harvard and MIT. In the Liu laboratory, Dr. Anzalone pioneered the development of prime editing. This novel search-and-replace gene editing technology can potentially correct the large fraction of known human genetic variants associated with disease.

Dr. Anzalone completed his M.D. and Ph.D. degrees at Columbia University, where his thesis research in Virginia W. Cornish’s laboratory focused on chemical biology and synthetic biology. He received his Sc.B. degree in chemistry from Brown University, where he performed undergraduate research in synthetic organic chemistry.

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Brandon DeKosky, Ph.D., Assistant Professor of Chemical Engineering, Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Dr. Brandon DeKosky is an assistant professor in the Department of Chemical Engineering at MIT and a core member of the Ragon Institute of Massachusetts General Hospital, Harvard, and MIT. Research efforts at the DeKosky lab have developed a suite of high-throughput single-cell platforms for large-scale analyses of adaptive immunity. These efforts advance new approaches in biologic drug discovery and cataloging the vast genetic and functional diversity of adaptive immune cells in multiple disease settings. Key application areas include infectious disease interventions, especially malaria and HIV-1 prevention, and the development of personalized cancer therapeutics.

Dr. DeKosky has been awarded several honors for his research program. His Ph.D. research was supported by a Hertz Foundation and NSF Graduate Fellowship. In 2016, DeKosky was awarded a K99 Pathway to Independence Award and an NIH Early Independence Award and began a joint faculty appointment at the University of Kansas Departments of Chemical Engineering and Pharmaceutical Chemistry. He has also received the Department of Defense Career Development Award, the Biomedical Engineering Society Rising Star Award, and the AIChE Young Faculty Futures award. In 2021, Dr. DeKosky began a new position as an assistant professor in a joint appointment at MIT Chemical Engineering and The Ragon Institute.