3 minute read
An employee carries test tubes inside a laboratory at Piramal s Research Centre in Mumbai, August 11, 2014. REUTERS/Danish Siddiqui
NEW YORK, June 28 (Reuters Breakingviews) - Investors can always count on the discovery of a golden nugget to create a rush. Intellia Therapeutics (NTLA.O) delivered the biotechnology version of this on Saturday, proving its technology for clustered regularly interspaced short palindromic repeats, or CRISPR, can target and edit a defective gene in humans. Investors are ready for a boom.
Company co-founder Jennifer Doudna won the Nobel Prize last year for developing the technology. Now her firm showed in a small trial it can stop production of a defective protein in the liver that causes an inherited disease. That sent shares up over 50% on Monday, adding $3 billion to the companyâs market capitalization and large amounts to other firms using similar gene-editing therapies.
MRNA scramble
reuters.com - get the latest breaking news, showbiz & celebrity photos, sport news & rumours, viral videos and top stories from reuters.com Daily Mail and Mail on Sunday newspapers.
Capital Calls: HSBC, MRNA scramble, Cable project
breakingviews.com - get the latest breaking news, showbiz & celebrity photos, sport news & rumours, viral videos and top stories from breakingviews.com Daily Mail and Mail on Sunday newspapers.
© Houston Cofield/Bloomberg via Getty Images
Berkshire Hathaway, the holding company of legendary investor Warren Buffett, has held its annual shareholder meeting. The event, dubbed “Woodstock for capitalists”, has been happening virtually because of the pandemic . It yielded the usual mixture of folksy commentary and gnomic wisdom. Buffett said that the US economy is “red hot” and Berkshire’s portfolio of businesses “is seeing substantial inflation”. He joked that Charlie Munger, his 97-year-old deputy, will be ageing at just “1% annually” once he hits his centenary. Munger dubbed bitcoin “a currency that’s so useful to kidnappers and extortionists”.
It hasn’t been quite the usual love-in, says Robert Cyran on Breakingviews. The “pew-sitters in the Church of Buffett” revolted, with one-quarter of shareholders voting to require more disclosure about efforts to “address climate change” and encourage “workforce diversity”. Management defeated