SAN FRANCISCO — The drug maker GlaxoSmithKline announced Thursday that it would team up with some of the nation’s most prominent CRISPR researchers to use the gene-editing technology in a search for new medicines, establishing a new lab in San Francisco and spending up to $67 million over five years.

Jennifer Doudna, the University of California, Berkeley, researcher who co-invented the CRISPR enzyme technology, will help lead the effort, along with Jonathan Weissman, a UC San Francisco researcher who has been using CRISPR to understand the function of individual human genes and how they work together. Both are Howard Hughes Medical Institute investigators.