So ti later.
Intelligentsia made a new announcent.
“Using an AAV-Smad7 therapy built on CRISPR technology, we plan to present a new solution for corneal scarring.”
They had just received FDA approval to run CRISPR trials in animals, limited to a “single specific disease.”
And now they were revealing the first indication.
That indication was corneal scarring.
Corneal scarring.
It’s a condition where damage or scarring to the cornea reduces its transparency.
As the collagen fibers in the scar tissue line up irregularly, light can’t pass through properly, and in severe cases it can even lead to blindness.
Talia’s supporters cheered at the news.
They were thrilled that CRISPR was finally being used in real treatnts.
—“Talia’s probably clapping for this from the sky right now!”
— Finally, the live-action version of the CRISPR universe! #BucketList_Cleared
―“Guess Talia’s now officially signed up to be a happy ghost lol.”
—Corneas: “Starting today, I’m a Talia fan.”
—From now on I choose to believe CRISPR is carrying on Talia’s soul!
But there were people who couldn’t be happy about this at all.
That was Editors, the “rabbit” in this race for golden eggs.
“So that’s how they want to play it?”
“Please calm down.”
“Do I look like I can calm down right now? Our investors are about to bolt!”
The board had been called into an ergency eting.
The conference room was nothing but chaos, filled with curses and people shouting over each other.
The directors fud at one another for a long while before their voices finally started to die down a few minutes later.
“Their intention is way too obvious. They’re aiming straight at us.”
On the surface, the corneal scarring Intelligentsia had chosen looked unrelated to Editors’ LCA10, but in reality that wasn’t true.
The core technology used to treat both diseases was the sa.
“And out of all the possible vectors, they just happened to pick AAV5! How is that not deliberate?”
In CRISPR clinical trials, the biggest hurdle was “precise delivery.”
In other words, how you deliver the gene-editing system to the target tissue.
Yet Intelligentsia had officially announced that their vector of choice would be adeno-associated virus (AAV)—specifically AAV5.
The problem was that Editors had also chosen AAV5.
“If they finish the technology first…!”
That would an handing over all the patents and licenses.
This wasn’t just about pride.
Money.
And not just a little—enough money to make or break the entire company.
“We have to get there first!”
“But is that even possible? When it cos to animal studies, they have an overwhelming advantage.”
Editors had already completed the theory behind AAV5-based CRISPR delivery.
What remained was confirming how the system behaved inside a living body.
And to find out how AAV5-CRISPR would react in each tissue and cell outside the lab, how the immune system would respond, and whether there was any toxicity or long-term organ damage—what did they need?
Clinical trials were essential.
But…
On the surface, Editors looked like the frontrunner, already moving ahead as they went through the FDA’s clinical approval process, but—
“Intelligentsia is doing animal trials, so the regulations are completely different!”
That gap was huge.
Any human clinical trial has to pass a strict review by an ethics committee (an IRB), and step-by-step safety checks are mandatory; that process alone eats up anywhere from several months to almost a year.
But animals?
There is no ethics committee.
Even safety reviews mostly focus on how it might affect humans.
And as long as you’re not using food animals, if the experintal design looks halfway decent, it almost always gets waved through.
In other words, the remaining “wall” each company had to break through was completely different in thickness.
“And on top of that, corneal scarring isn’t even a rare disease! If the condition is this common…!”
It’s easy to recruit subjects.
While Editors struggled to find enough rare-disease patients, they could race through efficacy and side-effect evaluations in hundreds of animals.
“Then what if we also find a ‘less rare’ indication that uses AAV5—”
“We can’t. In that case, we might not even make it into clinical trials.”
There was a reason they had deliberately chosen the rare disease LCA10.
It was because of the “accelerated approval” pathway the FDA only allows for rare diseases.
But there’s no such perk for common diseases.
From the start of a trial to final approval, you typically have to brace yourself for five to ten years.
Simply because their subjects were human, they were shackled in all sorts of ways.
At that point, one of the directors cautiously spoke up.
“Even so… even if they do succeed, they can’t apply it to humans right away, can they? I an, if we can just secure the title of ‘first-in-human clinical trial,’ wouldn’t the damage be limited? Animals and humans are fundantally different, after all.”
He wasn’t wrong.
No matter how successful an animal study is, it’s a different species, so there’s no guarantee the results will translate cleanly to humans; so the argunt that they just needed to grab the first-in-human label made sense.
But soone imdiately pushed back.
“That’s true for the drug itself. But patents are a different story.”
There are two main revenue streams in new drug developnt.
One is the direct inco from selling the drug.
The other is royalties and settlents that co from the underlying “platform technology.”
But LCA10 was such a rare disease that they had never picked it expecting big profits from the drug itself.
The real money was always ant to flow in through technology licensing.
And right now Intelligentsia was gunning for the fundantal patents that guaranteed that massive profitability.
“But wouldn’t those patents only cover animals in the end? If we file a patent on the human application—”
“It’s not that simple.”
The world of patents was complicated.
To be granted a patent, you needed a decisive difference that was “clearly distinct” from everything that ca before.
In other words, unless you discovered so original chanism or process that applied only to humans and was completely distinct from animal work, there was little room for a separate human-only patent.
“If you look at real cases, there are plenty of technologies validated in animal studies that get applied to humans almost as-is; we can’t completely rule out that happening this ti.”
In short, even a latecor could flip the entire board if they were the first to secure the patent.
If that happened, the market leader, Editors, would end up paying the newcor just to use the technology.
And everyone in the room felt a strange sense of déjà vu.
“This might be revenge.”
“Sohow…”
A latecor swooping in to steal the frontrunner’s results.
That was exactly what had happened in the CRISPR patent war.
The way Editors, as a latecor, had quickly extended the CRISPR tech Dowden first used in prokaryotic cells into eukaryotic cells and grabbed the patent first.
This ti, Intelligentsia was trying to seize the CRISPR tech patents through AAV5 and pay Editors back in the sa way.
Sa person, similar situation.
No matter how you looked at it, it was hard not to see a kind of payback instinct mixed into this move.
“Dowden really is changing…”
One of the board mbers let out a bitter laugh.
It was hard to believe that Dowden, who had always presented herself as a lofty, pure scientist, would choose a tactic like this.
But CEO Moslin shook her head firmly when she heard that.
“This isn’t Dowden. It’s Ha Si-heon.”
The person who had provided Intelligentsia with both the animal hospital network and the capital.
That was Ha Si-heon.
Turning the situation over in her mind, she spoke carefully.
“It’s possible… that the one trying to take revenge isn’t Dowden at all, but Ha Si-heon.”
Ha Si-heon had once offered to invest in Editors.
But they had rejected that offer without a second thought.
This move might very well be payback for that.
“Is this his way of saying it’s not too late yet, that we should accept his offer after all…?”
“But from his position as an investor in Intelligentsia, that would create a direct conflict of interest. This isn’t him trying to join hands with us—it’s him trying to push us out entirely.”
“Why on earth…?”
“Is he really doing all this just out of revenge? Ha Si-heon?”
One of the directors tilted his head.
He was feeling a mont of cognitive dissonance.
To the outside world, Ha Si-heon was a man with a virtuous image.
The righteous Wall Street financier who fights for rare-disease patients.
But the CEO continued.
“Look at the rest of his record. The mont he believes he has the moral high ground, he becos more ruthless than anyone.”
Theranos, Valeant, and even China.
The public had always gone wild whenever Ha Si-heon toppled his targets.
But if you really broke it down, he had been equally rciless to everyone.
Whether the target was a fraud, a price-gouging Wall Street icon, or simply “China,” which made people cheer by default.
If you looked closely at what actually happened behind the scenes when he forced them to their knees…
A faint chill crept up her spine.
The CEO shook her head, pushing away the ominous feeling.
That wasn’t what mattered right now.
Editors had already put all of its golden eggs into a single basket: .
And the investors had put in their money solely based on that.
But if they lost the patents on the crucial technology needed to get there?
The company would never survive.
“We don’t have a choice. If we want to live, there’s only one option left. We have to beat them to the technology.”
“But how…?”
“We expand the scale of the trial, and we recruit patients as fast as humanly possible. We also push to get the ethics committee reviews done as quickly as we can.”
It wasn’t impossible.
If they partnered with more hospitals, patient recruitnt would speed up, and if they provided more complete, high-quality data, the ethics committees would likely move their reviews up as well.
The problem was… that carrying out all of this would cost a massive amount of money.
“If we do that, our burn rate is going to spike.”
“But if we don’t invest right now, we could lose everything. Timing is the key.”
Editors wasn’t completely out of financial room.
But clinical trials took an incredibly long ti.
They couldn’t be sure that burning through all their current resources in one go was really the smart move.
Still, this wasn’t business as usual—it was a crisis.
The board split into two camps.
“If we lose this race, we lose everything!”
One camp insisted they needed to sprint at full speed right now.
“If we charge ahead without any guarantee of winning, we’ll run out of money before we even reach the finish line. This isn’t a sprint—it’s a marathon!”
The other camp argued they had to conserve their strength.
The clash between the full-sprint faction and the conserve-energy faction heated the room for quite so ti.
After a fierce debate, the full-sprint side finally won.
They decided not to hold back on investnt so they could push the trial speed to the max.
But.
Deciding and actually doing it were two different things.
No matter how loudly they shouted “Go faster!” inside the company, there was still a step they couldn’t skip.
“Let’s talk to our partner.”
Like all small biotech firms, Editors was running its trials in partnership with a big pharma company.
In the end, the partner held the purse strings.
All that was left was to persuade them.
The Editors CEO t with the partner and laid out the situation.
But.
What ca back was an unexpected answer.
“Honestly, this isn’t enough to justify approval. It feels like you’re letting your emotions cloud your judgnt.”
“I’ve already told you this is a decisive mont. Ha Si-heon—”
“Yes, that Ha Si-heon. I think you’re misunderstanding him. He’s not the kind of man who lets personal grudges drive his decisions.”
It was strange.
The partner pharma company sounded almost too favorable toward Ha Si-heon.
“As for that issue, Sean has already explained it.”
They were even calling him by his Arican na.
“He told us himself. This is all a misunderstanding, and Talia Genetics is just looking at AAV5 along with all the other vectors. They’re not trying to compete with Editors directly. And he’s not wrong—there’s no way we can just monopolize every technology and say, ‘You don’t get to use any of it.’”
“You spoke with him… directly?”
“Of course. Sean used to sit on our board and was one of our major shareholders; we’re more than close enough for that.”
Only then did the Editors CEO realize it.
The crucial fact she had overlooked.
Editors’ partner company was none other than Allergan.
And Allergan had a deep connection with Ha Si-heon.
Both the Herbalife incident and the Valeant saga had started with Allergan.
When Ackman had tried to swallow Allergan whole, it was Ha Si-heon who set all of Wall Street on fire to stop him.
From Allergan’s perspective, Ha Si-heon was practically a savior.
‘What the…?’
A lightning bolt of realization shot through CEO Moslin’s mind.
They had signed the partnership deal with Allergan back in March.
At the ti of the Herbalife scandal, she had just watched from the sidelines, thinking it was soone else’s business.
The Herbalife short-selling battle had been so huge that Allergan’s role got buried in the flas and quickly faded from mory.
And when they’d vetted their future partner, she’d looked over the list of major shareholders but had seen the na “Pareto Innovation” and simply assud it was just another hedge fund investor.
But now…
Ha Si-heon had been a forr Allergan board mber and major shareholder?
By the ti she realized it, it was too late.
There was nothing she could do now.
‘Wait—was this his plan from the start?’
The reason Ha Si-heon had been so confident from day one.
Maybe it was because he’d always held the key to shaking Editors’ funding at its source.
That was the problem.
The biggest sponsor backing the rabbit’s sprint—
Turned out to be the tortoise’s best friend.
A cold sensation crawled down the CEO’s back.
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