The Harrington Project was established in Delaware in May 2025, under the name Preventive Medicine PBC. As a public benefit corporation, it is organized to put its public mission above profits. “If our research shows [heritable genome editing] “While this cannot be done safely, this conclusion is equally important to the scientific community and society,” Harrington wrote in his post.
Harrington is a co-founder of Mammoth Biosciences, a gene-editing company seeking to make medicines available to adults, and of which he remains a board member.
In recent months, Preventive has sought endorsements from prominent figures in the genome editing field, but according to its post, it has received only one endorsement, from Paula Amato, a fertility doctor at Oregon Health Sciences University, who said she had agreed to serve as an advisor to the company.
Amato is a member of a US team that has conducted research on embryo editing in the country since 2017, and has promoted the technology as a way to increase the success of IVF. This might be the case if editing could correct abnormal embryos, making more of them available for use in trying to cause pregnancy.
It remains unclear where the precautionary funding comes from. The $30 million was raised from “private funders who share our commitment to pursuing this research responsibly,” Harrington said. But he declined to identify those investors other than SciFounders, an investment firm he runs with his personal and business partner Matt Krysilov, CEO of the biotech company Conception, which aims to create human eggs from stem cells.
This is another technology that, if successful, could change the reproductive process. Krysilov is listed as a member of Preventive’s founding team.
The idea of mod babies has received increasing attention from figures in the cryptocurrency space. These include Brian Armstrong, the billionaire founder of Coinbase, who held a series of informal dinners to discuss the technology (which Harrington attended). Armstrong has previously argued that “the time is right” for a startup in the area.