With CRISPR in Humans On the Horizon, Will the Public Back Intellia?

Boston — An icy March wind was blowing across the Charles River, but in the laboratory of Intellia Therapeutics, the 1970s soft-rock hit “Summer Breeze” was blasting. Chief scientific officer Tom Barnes apologized. “Usually it’s heavy metal,” he said. He pointed out a window to a local tower, visible over the Cambridge, MA rooftops, rising from a nearby neighborhood. Intellia’s new offices were somewhere near there, out of our line of sight.

The two year old company’s more fateful impending move is a push to go public. Its IPO is scheduled for next week. That means the company, working to create new medicines with arguably the biggest biomedical innovation of the 21st century—the groundbreaking form of gene editing called CRISPR-Cas9—must convince investors to bet on its future even though it lacks what so many biotech investors crave: data from human clinical trials. What will CRISPR-Cas9 do when it gets into human cells and changes their DNA?

Intellia indicated in regulatory filings Wednesday it wants to raise $85 million in an IPO, plus a few million more if all...