Designer Baby Companies Are in Turmoil

Two companies that launched last year with plans to create gene-edited babies have already shut down, citing money issues and internal conflict.

One of them, Manhattan Genomics of New York, closed abruptly shortly after announcing a team of scientific advisers in October that included a prominent fertility doctor, a data scientist who worked for de-extinction company Colossal Biosciences, and a scientist who pioneered a “three-parent” IVF technique. The other, California-based Bootstrap Bio, said it ceased operations in late 2025, as first reported by Mother Jones.

Manhattan Genomics and Bootstrap Bio had ambitions to edit DNA in human embryos with the goal of preventing serious disease in babies. Known as germline editing, the idea is highly controversial because any changes made at the embryo level would be passed on to future generations. It’s different from gene-editing treatments currently being tested on patients, which only affect the treated individual.

The safety and efficacy of germline editing is also unproven. One concern is that the technology can result in unintended, potentially harmful “off-target” edits. Many researchers worry that permitting embryo editing to address serious diseases will inevitably lead to it being used for enhancement purposes, such as appearance or intelligence, to make “designer babies.” It’s currently prohibited in the US and many other countries to initiate a pregnancy with an edited embryo.

There are three known children who were gene-edited as embryos as a part of a now infamous 2018 experiment conducted by Chinese scientist He Jiankui. The revelation shocked the international scientific community, and a Chinese court sentenced He to three years in prison for illegal medical practices. Once taboo, the prospect of gene-edited babies has been recently revived by biotech entrepreneurs, futurists, and Silicon Valley investors. But the path to a viable gene-edited baby business is apparently presenting some challenges.

"We ran out of money. We had some promising results in the lab but I couldn’t get enough investors interested for us to keep our operation going," Bootstrap Bio CEO and cofounder Chase Denecke told WIRED via email. The company still exists but isn’t actively operating, he added.

Bootstrap has had other problems. In August 2025, federal officers arrested the company’s chief science officer at the time, Qichen Yuan, and charged him with attempted sex trafficking of a child, as Mother Jones reported. Yuan is now set to appear in federal court in Boston. When reached via email, Yuan’s lawyer declined to comment.

Denecke told WIRED that he didn’t know about the charges until after the company “ceased active operations.” Yuan worked as a contractor for Bootstrap Bio in 2024 and 2025 until the company shut down, according to Denecke. “We would have let him go earlier if we had known,” Denecke said over email.

Bootstrap Bio had early interest from investors. In a 2024 LinkedIn post announcing the formation of the startup, for example, Denecke mentioned that a venture capitalist flew him out to Honduras.

Manhattan Genomics, which also went by Manhattan Project, planned to pursue human embryo editing for disease prevention. In a since deleted X post from March, cofounder Cathy Tie said the startup shut down due to a “cofounder conflict.” At the same time, she publicly announced the formation of a new company, Origin Genomics, to advance germline gene correction.

Manhattan Genomics’ cofounder Eriona Hysolli told WIRED that she and Tie parted ways due to “fundamental disagreements stemming from the coexistence of a Cayman-based entity with the same name with separate governance by my cofounder, and which confounded the open and transparent mission of Manhattan Genomics.”

A trademark application for Manhattan Project filed in September with the US Patent and Trademark Office names the Cayman Islands as a related LLC’s place of organization. Tie claims Hysolli was aware of the Cayman entity from the outset.

“I continue to believe the US should lead the way for this very important field of research,” Hysolli said. “I am very committed to the field and want to see prevention of genetic disease at the earliest stage of development become a reality for future parents.”

Hysolli was previously the head of biological sciences at Colossal Biosciences, which last year claimed to produce extinct dire wolves by editing the DNA of gray wolves. Tie is a former Thiel fellow and left college to start her first company, the genetic screening firm Ranomics. She announced Manhattan Genomics in August last year after going public with her relationship with He, the Chinese gene-editing scientist. Both Tie and He told WIRED they are no longer together.

Manhattan Genomics was operational for about four months before it shut down. It had not yet generated any substantial intellectual property, and Tie said she returned investor capital. “I believe that there is still a lot of work that needs to be done in the space, which motivates me to start a new company doing some of the same work but hopefully pushing this forward in a more accelerated way in the United States,” she said in an interview.

Denecke and Hysolli are listed as speakers affiliated with their former companies at a major synthetic biology industry conference in May.

A third embryo editing company, Preventive, emerged in October with $30 million in funding, Billionaires Brian Armstrong, the CEO of Coinbase, and OpenAI CEO Sam Altman and husband Oliver Mulherin, are funding the startup. Preventive did not respond to a request for comment on the status of the company.