Alexis C. Komor

Biography
Alexis C. Komor is a pioneering genomeediting researcher who codeveloped the first CRISPR base editors with David Liu at the Broad Institute. Her work established base editing as a new class of genome engineering tools that enable precise singlenucleotide changes in DNA without doublestrand breaks, laying the foundation for correcting diseasecausing point mutations with high precision. She continues to lead efforts to translate these innovations into direct in vivo therapeutics, including strategies to deliver base editors via mRNA and other nucleicacid platforms to repair genes within patients cells. As her work established the scientific foundation of Beam Therapeutics, Komor has helped drive the clinical development of base editing, underscoring the broad impact of her work on programmable gene editing and precision medicine. Her groundbreaking contributions are influencing a new generation of in vivo RNA and genebased therapies (spanning mRNA, siRNA, and antisense oligonucleotide modalities) and inspiring novel smallmolecule approaches to treat genetic diseases.

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Talk
Development and Characterization of Precision Genome Editing Tools
Base editors facilitate the introduction of point mutations into the genome of live cells with high efficiencies and precision via targeted nucleobase chemistry. In this talk I will describe my lab's efforts to develop new base editing methodologies and their application to correcting disease-causing mutations.