Nicole Gaudelli, Ph.D., is a life sciences Entrepreneur in Residence with Google Ventures and the inventor of the Adenine Base Editor (ABE). This gene editing tool expands existing CRISPR technology to allow for changes to single-letter genetic mutations. Her work has helped shift the thinking on how human genetic diseases can be more than treated, but potentially prevented. The result is a form of precision medicine, tailored at the individual genetic level, allowing for changes to the “misspellings,” she says, of the 3 billion nucleotide bases that make up our DNA.
While CRISPR cuts the strands of DNA in two pieces, identifying a unique strand and then replacing it, ABE allows for more precise conversion, akin to using a “pencil and eraser instead of scissors and glue,” Gaudelli said during her TEDMed talk in 2019. Using the tool, scientists can replace a single letter — just one nucleotide base — rather than an entire sequence, by converting one base into another. That precision opens the door to restoring function, rather than removing dysfunction, noted Harvard chemical biologist Dr. David Liu, whose lab Gaudelli worked at as a postdoctoral fellow when she invented the ABE tool.
In 2025, ABE corrected a genetic mutation in an infant, successfully applying the lab-based application to a living patient. Today, numerous labs and pharmaceutical companies license the technology for applications and clinical trials, including those seeking potential treatments for human genetic diseases, such as sickle cell or Tay-Sachs. And Gaudelli believes that gene editing offers patients a way to change the path their genetics once dictated for their lives, by writing a different, healthier outcome.
Before joining Google Ventures, Gaudelli worked as a VP of gene editing for Beam Therapeutics, a Cambridge, Mass.-based pharmaceutical company, overseeing the engineering of therapeutic gene-editing tools and developed the base editors used in multiple clinic trials including for sickle cell disease, alpha-1 antitrypson (A1ATD), GSD1a and hypertension (PCSK9). Additionally she pioneered the development of a novel, non-genotoxic conditioning alternative through multiplex base editing for stem cell transplants. At Google Ventures, Gaudelli identifies new business opportunities and investments in the biomedical field and is working on new company formation in a variety of therapeutic spaces.
An inventor with several gene editing patents to her name, Gaudelli earned her Ph.D. in chemistry from Johns Hopkins University and conducted her postdoctioral research at Harvard University. Both her doctoral and postdoctoral work in chemistry and gene editing has appeared in several Nature publications, including the seminal 2017 article, discussing ABE’s ability to “install disease-correcting or disease-suppressing mutations in human cells,” she and her co-authors wrote.
Gaudelli has earned numerous honors, including Fortune Magazine’s “40 Under 40 in Healthcare” and Johns Hopkins University’s Distinguished Alumna Award in 2022.
We are delighted that Dr. Gaudelli is joining the DOC Faculty for DOC 2026, and we look forward to hearing more from her exciting research and work in Napa Valley this fall.