Technology licensing and industry partnerships

These clinical-stage companies were founded with exclusive licenses to Broad-developed gene editing technologies for therapeutic applications:

• Beam Therapeutics: testing several base-editing treatments in clinical trials for genetic diseases 
• Editas Medicine: testing CRISPR-Cas9/Cas12a-based treatments. Editas has exclusive licences to these CRISPR technologies from Broad for human medicines, which enabled Casgevy, the first FDA-approved CRISPR medicine. 
• Prime Medicine: testing several prime editors in preclinical work and an early-stage clinical trial for genetic diseases and cancer

These companies launched with licensing agreements with Broad to build new approaches to delivering genetic medicines to targeted cells and tissues in the body: 

• Aera Therapeutics: a delivery-focused genetic medicine company focusing on nanoparticles and other approaches
• Apertura Gene Therapy: advancing AAVs for genetic medicines for central nervous system and neuromuscular diseases
• Kate Therapeutics: developing AAV-based genetic medicines for neuromuscular disorders. Acquired by Novartis.

Here are examples of companies that are commercializing research technologies developed at Broad, scaling them up and lowering costs to help advance science everywhere. 

Bifrost Biosystems signed an exclusive licensing agreement with Broad in 2024 to gain access to optical pooled screening, a Broad-developed technology that connects single-cell phenotype to genotype at massive scale. 

Curio Bioscience launched in 2023 to commercialize high-resolution and single-cell spatial mapping tools developed at Broad. Acquired by Takara Bio USA.

Broad grants non-exclusive licenses to gene editing technologies for academic/research and agricultural use. Learn more here.

Broad partnered with Manifold, a leader in research infrastructure for biomedical science, to develop a cutting-edge research platform. The platform builds on the principles of Terra, a trusted system for large-scale data analysis and secure collaboration. 

Broad also collaborated with Illumina to integrate GATK — a genome-analysis tool created by Broad scientists — with Illumina’s DRAGEN tool for genomic data analysis.

Broad-Bayer alliances launched in 2013 for oncology and in 2015 for cardiovascular research. The oncology alliance has led to a lung cancer drug, Hyrnuo®, which received FDA accelerated approval in 2025. The cardiovascular partnership has resulted in an atrial fibrillation drug candidate in early-stage clinical testing.

Broad and Calico began their partnership in 2015 focused on diseases of aging. It has resulted in a cancer immunotherapy candidate now being tested in an early-stage clinical trial.

In 2017, Broad and Deerfield Management began a partnership focused on early-stage academic and therapeutics research. In 2019, Jaguar Gene Therapy launched with financing from Deerfield and a pipeline of gene therapy candidates, including JAG201 for a leading monogenic cause of autism, which is clinically diagnosed as Phelan-McDermid syndrome and is caused by pathogenic variants in the SHANK3 gene or from chromosome 22q13.3 deletions encompassing SHANK3. This gene therapy candidate is exclusively licensed from Broad. JAG201 is currently in an early-stage clinical trial.

A joint cancer research collaboration between Microsoft and Broad called Project Ex Vivo envisions a new, constructionist paradigm for precision oncology, one powered by the bottom-up integration of experimentation and computation.

Broad leads or is a key partner in cutting-edge consortia with industry collaborators, including the Cancer Dependency Map Consortium, which launched in 2018 and has 22 biopharma partners.