Jessie Davis

Key facts

• Trade press coverage of the 2026 ASGCT annual meeting describes her as a chemical biologist in the Sonia Vallabh and Eric Minikel group at the Broad Institute, speaking in the session on advances in cell and gene therapies for chronic infectious diseases.
• The Liu laboratory roster lists her under former group members as a graduate student, so her time in that laboratory is over and the Vallabh and Minikel attribution is the more recent of the two.
• Her published affiliations are the Merkin Institute of Transformative Technologies in Healthcare at the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard, the Department of Chemistry and Chemical Biology at Harvard University, and the Howard Hughes Medical Institute at Harvard University.
• She is first author on Efficient in vivo base editing via single adeno-associated viruses with size-optimized genomes encoding compact adenine base editors, published online in Nature Biomedical Engineering on 28 July 2022, which is the cargo-shrinking line of work rather than a 2021 paper.
• She is co-first author with Meirui An on In vivo base editing extends lifespan of a humanized mouse model of prion disease, Nature Medicine, January 2025, with David Liu as senior author and Vallabh, Minikel and Deverman also on the paper.
• That study installed the PRNP R37X stop codon using dual AAV PHP.eB carrying BE3.9max and a single guide RNA, achieving about 37 percent installation of the edit, roughly 50 percent lower brain prion protein and 52 percent longer lifespan in transgenic human PRNP mice.
• At ASGCT 2026 she reported that smaller Cas proteins and adenine base editors tested to cut the vector dose gave lower editing efficiency and less prion protein reduction than the original split base editor, while saying single-AAV work continues with some success.
• In the last 24 months she appears as a co-author on five further records, including engineered virus-like particles for prime editor delivery (Nature Biotechnology, October 2024), a GFP-on mouse model for in vivo gene editing (Nature Communications, 31 July 2025), a molecular glue method to control CRISPR half-life (Journal of the American Chemical Society, 9 July 2025) and base editing to restore the immune system in a Rag2 point-mutant mouse (Molecular Therapy, 1 July 2026).
• She is an author on the bioRxiv preprint of 29 September 2026 on the BI-TfR1 CapX capsid for low-dose central nervous system delivery, alongside Chan, Deverman, Minikel and Vallabh, which ties her name to the delivery vehicle rather than only the editor.
• The only public professional route to her group is the Prions@Broad program address Prions@Broadinstitute.org, with research updates posted on the CureFFI.org blog; no individual Broad staff page for her was found.
• The Nature Medicine work was funded by the National Institutes of Health, the Prion Alliance and the Howard Hughes Medical Institute, and no award is publicly attributed to her as an individual.

Timeline

1. 2022First-author Nature Biomedical Engineering paper on single-AAV delivery of size-optimized compact adenine base editors published online.
2. 2024Co-author on a Nature Biotechnology paper on engineered virus-like particles for transient delivery of prime editor complexes in vivo.
3. 2025Broad Institute news item on the lifespan result, naming her and Meirui An as co-first authors and then graduate students in the Liu laboratory.
4. 2025Issue publication of the Nature Medicine paper on which she is co-first author; Broad and Harvard coverage framed it as a milestone with trials still years away.
5. 2025Co-author on a Nature Communications paper describing a GFP-on mouse model for interrogating in vivo gene editing.
6. 2026At the ASGCT annual meeting she presented the PRNP base editing programme and the state of single-AAV and capsid work.
7. 2026Co-author on a Molecular Therapy paper on base editing with non-genotoxic conditioning in a Rag2 point-mutant mouse model.
8. 2026Co-author on the bioRxiv preprint describing the BI-TfR1 CapX capsid for efficient low-dose gene delivery across the blood-brain barrier.