The GENETAGUS team is a research group and a company (GENETAGUS, 2022) working at the Egas Moniz School of Health & Science. The group leader has been publishing for several years on the RAG1/RAG2 endonuclease- and activation-induced deaminase-dependent processes underlying the immunoglobulin gene rearrangements that result in the production of improved antibodies by B cells (e.g. 1-5). As these processes involve the generation of double-strand breaks in the antibody genes, the CRISPR-Cas technology was appealing to us. Like hundreds of groups around the world, we adopted CRISPR-Cas as our preferred gene-editing technology to manipulate the genome. In parallel, we also became interested in the technique itself, and we’ve been working on ways to improve it (6). In 2019, given the prohibitive prices charged for genome editing services by companies, we decided to create a service with competitive prices, fully customizable and based on the most recent techniques. The service functioned throughout 2020 and 2021 in a small lab of Nova Medical School. In November 2021, we received a great offer from Egas Moniz and in May 2022 we moved to the Egas Moniz campus. We are currently working in a fully autonomous space composed of 10 rooms with state-of-the-art equipment.
Our mission: to provide affordable and high-quality services and to develop new products in the gene-editing field.
Team
Vasco Barreto – Principal investigator
João Tiago Proença – 2º Research
Partnerships
GENETAGUS functions as the Genome editing company. In parallel, we work as a research group of Egas Moniz.
We have an ongoing collaboration with the group of Maria Carmo-Fonseca (Institute of Molecular Medicine, Portugal) in the context of a “la Caixa” Foundation project on hypertrophic myocardiopathy.