Head of the DNA Editing Platform, Beam Therapeutics
Nicole Gaudelli received her B.S. degree in biochemistry from Boston College in May of 2006. While at Boston College she conducted research under the guidance of Prof. Steve Bruner to elucidate the enzymatic mechanisms of an aminotransferase involved in neocrazinostatin biosynthesis and a non-heme iron oxygenase involved in vancomycin assembly. She then joined the laboratory of Prof. Craig Townsend at Johns Hopkins University where she studied a non-ribosmal peptide synthetase (NRPS) implicated in the biosynthesis of the β-lactam antibiotic nocardicin. In her doctoral work she elucidated the mechanism through which monobactam anitbiotics are biosynthesized. She next pursued postdoctoral work at Harvard University in the laboratory of Professor David R. Liu where she expanded the capabilities of base-editing technology by creating an adenine base editor (ABE), through 7 rounds of evolution and engineering, which cleanly converts A•T base pairs to G•C base pairs in a programmable manner, with low indel %, and without double-stranded DNA breaks. She joined Beam Therapeutics where she is the Head of the DNA Editing Platform in order to further expand and apply base editing technology to human genetic diseases. Nicole was a recipient of the 2018 American Chemical Society's “Talented 12” award and also recognized as a 2018 STAT Wunderkind.