Benjamin Oakes, PhD

“We knew all of the techniques that we would have to apply to make an ideal therapeutic modality. With that goal in mind, we launched Scribe.”

Benjamin L. Oakes is the co-founder, President, and Chief Executive Officer at Scribe Therapeutics. Previously, as an Innovative Genomics Institute Entrepreneurial Fellow, Ben focused on the holistic engineering of genome editing technologies to build novel genome editing molecules.

Oakes has contributed to over 25 publications and patent applications on topics including synthetic biology, molecular engineering, CRISPR and zinc finger-based genetic modification. Oakes received a Ph.D. in Molecular and Cellular Biology from UC Berkeley in 2017, where he worked in the Doudna Lab and Savage Lab developing CRISPR-Cas9 molecules with enhanced characteristics. Two such projects resulted in distinct versions of synthetic sensing systems that can modify nucleic acids only when triggered by external stimuli, and have found use in both research and pragmatically applied technologies.

Prior to his Ph.D. Oakes received his B.A. in the fields of Philosophy and Neurobiology and worked as a researcher applying unbiased, combinatorial evolution methods to build tens of thousands of “version one” genome editing tools, providing an open source framework for scientists and medical professionals to modify the genome B.C. — before the discovery of CRISPR technology.