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Bayer will spend 325 million euros ($353 million) on research into a promising new gene editing technology as part of a joint venture with biotech firm CRISPR Therapeutics.

Under the deal, the German drugmaker will pay for the joint venture's research over the next five years, 300 million euros in total. The venture will be 50 percent owned by the partners.

Bayer will buy a minority stake in CRISPR Therapeutics for 35 million euros.

CRISPR Therapeutics, headquartered in Basel, Switzerland, with research operations based in Cambridge, Massachusetts, uses the so-called CRISPR-Cas9 technology, which has become the preferred method of gene editing in research labs due to its ease of use.

CRISPR, which stands for clustered regularly interspaced short palindromic repeats, allows scientists to edit genes by using biological "scissors" that operate a bit like a word-processing program that can find and replace defects.

The joint venture will look into ways to fix malfunctioning genes in parts of the body that are at the origin of certain diseases, such as liver cells that fail to produce blood coagulation factors...