Jeremy Duffield

About Jeremy Duffield

Today I joined Prime Medicine as the Chief Scientific Officer! I couldn’t be more thrilled to join a company aspiring to change the practice of medicine by curing diseases through the advancement of a new genome-editing approach called \"prime editing.\" Our innovative technology enables highly flexible rewriting of DNA sequences and has the potential to treat nearly 90 percent of known disease-causing genetic mutations. Backed by top tier investors and supported by a strong board and advisors, I’m building my platform and initial program teams and seeking outstanding scientists with gene editing experience to join me on the journey. Interested? Please apply to c••••••@primemedicine.com.\'Prior to joining Prime, Jeremy served as VP of business development and external innovation at Vertex Pharmaceuticals, building Vertex Cell and Genetic Therapies, and advancing gene editing and cell therapies for patients with Duchenne muscular dystrophy and type I diabetes mellitus. He also served as Global Head of Human Biology at Vertex where his team contributed to building Vertex therapeutic programs including cystic fibrosis, sickle cell disease, alpha-1 anti-trypsin deficiency, APOL1-mediated kidney diseases, myotonic dystrophy. From 20••••16 he was was Senior Research Fellow & VP of R&D at Biogen identifying new therapeutic targets in CNS, lung & kidney diseases, and co-leading the Tissue Injury & Fibrosis therapeutic area, where the team developed a pipeline of therapies for chronic diseases, including Integrin αvβ6 blockade for IPF, IRAK4 inhibition for several immunological indications, and therapies for lupus nephritis. Jeremy is a Physician Scientist, with a background in developmental biology and innate immunity. Until 2013 he ran a basic science laboratory at Harvard and UW, Seattle, WA, as Assoc. Prof. of Medicine, and he practiced internal medicine and nephrology part-time. His lab published > 125 peer-review articles, developed novel animal transgenics systems, viral delivery systems, patient derived cell-based disease models and informatics to tackle understanding of human diseases. Major scientific contributions include identification of regulators of macrophage polarization, discovery of fibroblast progenitor cells known as pericytes and MSCs. The lab identified important disease roles for c-JUN, WNT, MyD88, Pentraxin-2 & microRNA-21, leading to patents, therapeutic candidates and clinical trials in Alport syndrome, IPF, & stroke.

Experience

1. Chief Scientific Officer

   Prime Medicine, Inc.

   Dec 2020 — Present · Cambridge, MA, US

   Prime Medicine, Inc. was founded in 2019, developed in the lab of David Liu, PhD, a founder of the company, and funded by several prominent investors. Prime Medicine aspires to change the practice of medicine by curing diseases through the advancement of a new genome-editing approach called \"prime editing,\" an innovative technology that enables highly flexible rewriting of DNA sequences. It is a versatile and precise genome editing method that can make nearly any local alteration to precisely-targeted DNA sequences and has the potential to correct almost all disease-causing mutations. Engineered prime editors are modified Cas9 proteins coupled to reverse transcriptases. Prime editors use a new type of engineered guide RNA, called a pegRNA, that directs them to target DNA and also encodes the desired DNA edit. At the target DNA site, the modified Cas9 cuts one strand of the DNA, which the molecular complex uses to \"prime,\" or initiate, the reverse transcription of the edited genetic information carried by the pegRNA directly into the genome.

Education

• University of Oxford

  BM BCh, Medicine

  1989 — 1992

• The University of Edinburgh

  Doctor of Philosophy (PhD), Immunology

  1997 — 2001

• University of Oxford

  Bachelor of Arts (B.A.), Physiological Sciences Major Developmental Biology

  1986 — 1989