Podcast: Vincent Forster's Nerai engineers personalized genome editors to treat rare diseases
Our portfolio founder Vincent talks about building a CRISPR platform that creates tailored genome editors at scale, and why rare diseases need a fundamentally different approach to drug development.
Vincent Forster is a second-time founder. After successfully building and exiting his first company, he saw how much unmet need remains in rare diseases. There are roughly 10,000 known rare diseases, Vincent explains, and collectively they affect about one in ten people. Yet 95% have no approved treatment. The problem is structural: building a drug for a small patient population doesn't align with how pharmaceutical development traditionally works.
Vincent co-founded Nerai together with four scientists with deep expertise in genome editing, molecular biology, and artificial intelligence. The company has built a CRISPR protein engineering platform that combines directed evolution, high-throughput screening, and AI to design new genome editors that are more precise, more modular, and able to reach mutations that existing tools can't touch. According to Vincent, the original CRISPR editor can only target about 20% of disease-causing mutations. Nerai's goal is to close that gap.
The key insight is modularity. Once an editor has been validated as safe and effective for one indication, much of it can be reused for the next, because the delivery mechanism and the editor backbone stay the same. Only the targeting component changes. This makes rare diseases commercially viable as a group, even when individual conditions are too small to justify standalone development.
As Vincent puts it, the field is moving away from PowerPoint slides about CRISPR into entering the hospital and delivering CRISPR at the patient's bedside. Nerai is based in Zurich and aims to become a European-based global player in genome editing. The company graduated from Venture Kick in 2024 and joined the Kickfund portfolio in 2025.
Listen to the podcast for the full conversation!
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This interview is the fifth and final part in a series of podcast episodes co-produced by Kickfund and Swisspreneur. You can find the previous parts here: Wanja (Kickfund), Estelle (CellX), Imad (RTDT), Panos (Irmos Technologies).
