CRISPR Therapeutics Was Supposed to Change Medicine Forever. Then AI Showed Up.
If you bought CRISPR (CRSP 0.00%↑) Therapeutics stock in 2021, you were told you were buying the future of medicine. Gene editing would cure every disease, cancer, diabetes, and eventually rewrite the human genome itself.
Five years later, the stock is down roughly 64 percent. Shares trade near levels first seen in 2018. And a growing number of investors are asking a question that would have seemed absurd just a few years ago: has CRISPR already been left behind?
The Believers
CRSP attracted a devoted following. Cathie Wood’s ARK Invest made it a flagship holding, accumulating millions of shares at prices well above today’s levels. Wood repeatedly told investors that gene-editing companies represented a multi-trillion-dollar opportunity, comparing the CRISPR revolution to the early days of the internet.
She was far from alone. Institutional holders piled in during the 2020–2021 biotech boom. Retail investors on Reddit forums and fintwit hyped the stock as a generational buy.
Wall Street analysts set price targets as high as $200 or more during the peak. Prominent biotech investors argued the market was dramatically undervaluing the entire gene-editing sector. The thesis was simple: if you could edit human DNA to eliminate disease, the total addressable market was essentially infinite.
What Went Wrong
The problems were not with the science. They were with the business.
In 2025, it generated only $116 million in revenue, far below initial expectations, due to high treatment costs (around $2.2 million per patient) and complex administration processes.
Meanwhile, CRISPR Therapeutics reported a 2025 loss of $6.47 per share, up from $4.34 the prior year. Quarterly revenue came in at just $864,000 in Q4, missing estimates. The company holds over $1.9 billion in cash, but it burns through capital on R&D and clinical trials with no clear path to profitability in the near term.
For many early investors, the trade became a slow-motion loss, with each “buy the dip” averaging down into further decline. To make it worse, the stock made a death cross on Friday.
Is AI to Blame?
Artificial intelligence is not replacing CRISPR technology. It is, however, reshaping the entire landscape of drug discovery and biotech development in ways that directly affect the investment thesis.
AI-driven drug discovery firms like Recursion Pharmaceuticals and Insilico Medicine are compressing development timelines from years to months.
None of this makes CRISPR irrelevant. Gene editing remains one of the most powerful tools in medicine. But AI introduces a critical problem for CRSP investors: it democratizes and accelerates the entire field. When AI can help any biotech startup design better gene editors, optimize delivery systems, and predict clinical outcomes faster, the competitive moat around any single CRISPR company narrows.
CRISPR Therapeutics itself has not prominently positioned itself as an AI-integrated company. Its pipeline relies on classic CRISPR/Cas9 approaches, ex vivo therapies, and lipid nanoparticle delivery for in vivo targets. While the company may be using computational tools internally, there is no public emphasis on proprietary AI capabilities in its earnings reports, pipeline descriptions, or investor presentations. In a market that increasingly rewards AI integration, this absence is notable.
The Risk-Reward Calculus Has Changed
This is the core question for investors: if AI is accelerating drug discovery across the entire biotech sector, does CRSP still offer asymmetric upside?
The bull case requires believing the pipeline will produce positive data in cancer, diabetes, and other indications. It requires believing the company can navigate its cash burn without dilutive capital raises. And it requires believing that CRSP’s first-mover advantage in approved CRISPR therapies will hold as AI-designed competitors enter the field.
The bear case is simpler: CRSP is an unprofitable biotech trading on hope, with a single commercial product that is ramping slowly in a market where AI is rapidly lowering barriers to entry for competitors.
The honest answer is that AI has not made CRISPR technology irrelevant. It has made the investment case more complicated. A technology that was supposed to be a once-in-a-generation monopoly on gene editing now exists in an ecosystem where AI can design better editors, competitors can iterate faster, and the barriers to developing rival therapies are falling.
Should Investors Get Out?
There is no universal answer, but the framework for making the decision is clear.
If you bought CRSP because you believed it was the only company that could cure genetic diseases, you need to update that thesis. It is not the only company, and AI is helping ensure it never will be. Base editing firms like Beam Therapeutics and Intellia Therapeutics are advancing their own platforms. AI-designed editors are emerging from startups and academic labs. The competitive landscape for the future looks nothing like it did in 2021.
If you bought CRSP as a long-term bet on gene editing as a field, the thesis may still hold, but the vehicle might be wrong. A basket approach across multiple gene-editing and AI-biotech companies could offer better risk-adjusted returns than a concentrated position in a single unprofitable company.
If you are holding because you are underwater and hoping for a recovery, that is the most dangerous reason of all. The stock has broken every major technical support level. The fundamentals have deteriorated relative to expectations. And the competitive environment has shifted against concentrated bets on any single platform.
The future of medicine may still run through gene editing. The question is whether it still runs through CRSP.