Achieving the Potential of Genome Editing: the Perspective of the European Biotech Industry

The European Union has a unique opportunity to create headroom for innovation and continued investment for the future by fostering and guiding forward a major scientific breakthrough - genome editing.

Genome editing is an umbrella term for a range of tools that enable changes at targeted sites in the genome of an organism. Applied worldwide by researchers in academia, governmental research institutions and industry, these innovations represent a promising next step in research towards beneficial uses in medicine, agriculture and the bio-economy aimed at addressing some of society’s grand challenges.

While researchers, academia, industry and regulatory authorities have in-depth understanding of genome editing in terms of the underlying science and resulting benefits and challenges, this knowledge has not yet been fully passed on to the general public.

To help respond to this need, EuropaBio, the voice of the biotech industry, has developed this paper to bring the latest views from the developers and users of genome editing tools and applications.

Public engagement and proportionate regulatory policies would help ensure that Europe, together with the rest of the world, can reap the great societal and economic benefits that genome editing can bring.

EuropaBio calls upon European decision-makers to create platforms to ensure consumer confidence and to provide regulatory clarity to enable innovation for developing products by genome editing methods. To this end, EuropaBio calls for:

■ an inclusive, fact-based platform for dialogue, information sharing and trust building to be set up by the European Commission that brings together the EU Member States, industry, public researchers, academia and civil society;

■ a risk-proportionate, predictable, science-based and non-discriminatory application of existing policy approaches allowing innovation to benefit European society and the environment.

We stand ready to contribute to these efforts with our broad expertise in genome editing as it applies to healthcare, bio-economy and agriculture.

Download the file below to read the full position paper.