Ishita Jain

About Ishita Jain

I have spent the last 10+ years optimizing CRISPR systems to go beyond the petri dish. My focus is on structure-guided design—engineering enzymes like CasPhi from early-stage to clinical-grade candidates which are small enough for viral delivery but potent enough for permanent cures.What I bring to the table:• Technical Execution: Leveraging Rosetta, ProteinMPNN, and combinatorial/SSM libraries to engineer enzymes that outperform wild-type benchmarks.• Clinical Impact: Delivered variants validated to achieve ~70% editing efficiency and significant therapeutic knockdown in primate models.• Leadership: I don’t just run assays; I build the infrastructure. I excel at establishing high-throughput screening workflows and training teams to generate high-quality, reproducible data.

Experience

1. Scientist Ii

   Mammoth Biosciences

   Jul 2024 — Present

   Led technical development for protein engineering and assay optimization, creating novel enzymes for Therapeutic (Tx) and Diagnostic (Dx) pipelines.Therapeutic Genome Editing:• Spearheaded the engineering of proprietary ultracompact CasPhi (Cas12j) variants for the lead in vivo program targeting APOC3.• Delivered engineered variants that were validated to achieve ~70% liver editing efficiency and 73% sustained serum protein reduction in Non-Human Primates (NHP) via LNP delivery.• Optimized CRISPR-Cas systems in human cell lines, validating constructs compatible with AAV delivery vectors (<900aa payload).Epigenetic Editing:• Designed EpiCas fusion proteins (Cas enzymes fused to repressors like KRAB/DNMT).• Achieved durable suppression of therapeutic targets in cell-based assays without inducing double-strand breaks, significantly outperforming industry benchmarks.Platform & Leadership:• Established robust site saturation mutagenesis (SSM) and combinatorial library workflows to reduce codon redundancy and effectively sample protein sequence space, identifying variants with enhanced activity and stability.• Mentored team members on high-throughput screening strategies and managed technical relationships with external vendors (e.g, Twist, GenScript).

Education

• Rutgers University

  Doctor of Philosophy - PhD, CRISPR-Cas Systems, Microbiology and Molecular Biology

• Rutgers University

  Master’s Degree, Environment Microbiology

• Jaypee University of Information Technology

  Bachelor of Technology (BTech), Biotechnology

Skills

• Fermentation
• Sds-Page
• Chromatography
• Cell Biology
• Cell Culture
• Bioinformatics
• Microscopy
• Microsoft Excel
• Polymerase Chain Reaction (Pcr)
• Pcr
• Biochemistry
• Anaerobic Microbiology
• Gel Electrophoresis
• Molecular Biology
• Genetics
• Recombinant Dna Technology
• High-Performance Liquid Chromatography (Hplc)
• Dna Extraction
• Microsoft Office
• Hplc
• Western Blotting
• Microbiology
• Biotechnology
• Research
• Elisa