Basem Al-Shayeb

Basem Al-Shayeb is a founder and former Chief Technology Officer of Amber Bio, a biotechnology startup company in the San Francisco Bay Area which has raised $26 million to develop multi-kilobase RNA editing therapies using CRISPR-Cas.

He received his PhD in Microbial Biology as a National Science Foundation Fellow at the University of California, Berkeley and Innovative Genomics Institute, where he conducted his dissertation work in the lab of the 2020 Nobel Laureate in Chemistry Dr. Jennifer Doudna, and in the Earth and Planetary Science Department advised by Jillian Banfield. According to ORCID records, he is an active peer reviewer for Nature Portfolio research for several journals including ''Nature'', ''Nature Communications'', and ''Multidisciplinary Journal of Microbial Ecology (ISME)''.

During his time at UC Berkeley, he led or was co-first author on publications describing the discovery of the largest known bacteriophages in the journal ''Nature'', the smallest CRISPR-Cas genome editing systems in ''Science'' and ''Cell'' and a new form of extrachromosomal DNA elements, termed "Borgs," found in methane-oxidizing archaea (''Methanoperedens'' spp.) in ''Nature''. Some of the aforementioned CRISPR-Cas enzymes are licensed by Mammoth Biosciences for diagnostic and therapeutic development. He was listed in Forbes 30 Under 30 and Arab America's 30 Under 30 in 2021, and Forbes All-Star Alumni in 2024 for his scientific discoveries and contributions. Provided by Wikipedia