



Beam Therapeutics, a Cambridge genome editing startup, raised $180 million in an initial public offering Wednesday after increasing the number of shares it offered to investors by 48 percent.

The startup offered 10.6 million shares at $17, the high end of the expected range of $15 to $17 a share. The company originally filed to raise $100 million by offering 6.3 million shares at $15 to $17 before increasing its shares by nearly half early Wednesday.

Founded in 2017, Beam is using a new approach to CRISPR called base editing. Invented by David Liu, a researcher at the nonprofit Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard, base editing allows scientists to change individual letters of DNA.

Beam says this approach will help it create a new class of precision genetic medicines and has advantages over other experimental gene-editing efforts, including more predictable outcomes and fewer potential mistakes.

“If existing gene editing approaches are ‘scissors’ for the genome, our base editors are ‘pencils,’ erasing and rewriting one letter in the gene,” Beam said in a Jan. 30 filing with the US Securities and Exchange Commission.

The company says it has 12 preclinical programs with the potential to treat a broad array of diseases, including sickle cell disease, forms of leukemia, an inherited strain of macular degeneration, and liver disorders.

If things go as planned, the firm said, it could apply to the Food and Drug Administration as early as next year to begin clinical trials.

The public offering is expected to close Monday. The company’s stock is trading on the Nasdaq under the ticker symbol BEAM.



