Intellia Therapeutics was founded in May 2014 to develop biopharmaceuticals using CRISPR. It was backed by Atlas Venture and Novartis; the founding CEO was Nessan Bermingham from Atlas and the founding CSO was John Leonard, formerly CSO of AbbVie. The academic scientists involved in the founding included Rodolphe Barrangou, Rachel Haurwitz, Luciano Marraffini, Eric Sontheimer, and Derrick Rossi. The intellectual property around CRISPR was contested from the beginning; Intellia in-licensed patents from Caribou Biosciences, which had licensed patents from University of California invented by Jennifer Doudna. Novartis had funded the Series A round because of its interest in applying CRISPR in CAR-T, and in January 2015 Novartis and Intellia reached a deal through which Novartis obtained rights to use CRISPR for its CAR-T program, and the companies agreed to collaborate on ways to use CRISPR to treat diseases involving hematopoetic stem cells including beta thalassemia and sickle cell disease. Intellia formed a division called eXtellia Therapeutics to manage the CAR-T collaboration with Novartis. As of February 2015, Intellia's competitors included CRISPR Therapeutics, Editas Medicine and Horizon Discovery. Among large pharmaceutical companies, AstraZeneca had the broadest set of collaborations in CRISPR. In April 2017 Intellia entered into a partnership with Regeneron Pharmaceuticals under which Regeneron gained the exclusive right to use Intellia's CRISPR platform on up to 10 drug targets, of which up to five could be outside of the liver, and the companies agreed to co-develop other targets. Regeneron paid $75 million upfront, as well as milestones and royalties. The company said it planned to put $10 million of the funds into its bioinformatics program, to help it evaluate targets. In December 2016, the company moved to its new 80,000 sq. ft. laboratory and office space in Cambridge, Massachusetts. By that time, it had in-licensed a lipid nanoparticle drug delivery system to help with its efforts to deliver its CRISPR drugs to the liver, without being degraded in the bloodstream; at that time it had not disclosed the licensor. In March 2017 Intellia and Regeneron, its partner in co-developing a CRISPR-based treatment for transthyretin amyloidosis, presented data from a gene editing experiment in mice. By that time, University of California had lost a challenge to Broad's CRISPR patents, putting Intellia at a disadvantage relative to Editas. In December 2017 Leonard, who had experience in drug development, took over as CEO. In October 2019, Intellia named Glenn Goddard as its executive vice president and CFO. Prior to Intellia, Goddard was the CFO at Generation Bio Company and senior vice president of finance at Agios Pharmaceuticals.
Funding
In November 2014, Intellia Therapeutics raised $15 million in Series A round. In September 2015, a Series B round secured $70 million. In May 2016, Intellia announced the closing of its initial public offering which raised approximately $112.1 million. In the course of going public, the company disclosed that it had licensed the lipid drug delivery system from Novartis, and that it involved creating lipid droplets to encapsulate the CRISPR agents.
