This Keystone symposium on Precision Genome Engineering will assemble a broad mix of scientific leaders working across all stages of genome editing. The program focuses on understanding fundamental biology as well as the latest technology developments, emerging challenges, and progress in preclinical and clinical applications. The 2026 meeting will be jointly hosted with the Nucleic Acid Therapeutics symposium, which together will stimulate discussion and innovation between two fields that are becoming increasingly interconnected. Delivery and target selection, in particular, remain critical hurdles for the broad implementation of precision genetic medicines across diverse areas of human disease whether they involve genome editing or other modalities of nucleic medicines. Through the parallel meeting, attendees will gain a deeper understanding of the current state of the range of nucleic acid medicines, forging connections to catalyze innovations and collaborations. The 2026 Keystone symposium on Precision Genome Engineering will highlight various aspects of preeminent technologies capable of making small and large edits to the genome,epigenome, and transcriptome all towards the goal of developing precision genetic medicines.

The specific aims of this meeting are:

• Provide an update on the state of understanding of the structure and mechanism of genome editing tools

• Relate genome editing tools to natural defense and transposon systems from which they derive as well as DNA damage repair processes they depend on

• Discuss new classes of genome, epigenome and transcriptome editing tools that are expanding the type of changes that are possible

• Discuss recent advances in applying CRISPR tools to power functional genomics effort which are enabling basic discovery and identifying novel therapeutic targets

• Provide an update on the latest tools for translating genome editing including advances in delivery

• Provide an update on pre-clinical work and clinical trial results using genome editing in humans

• Identify cross-sectional knowledge gaps, technology short-comings, challenges, and future technologies that could address these issues.

• Have a high level and open discussion on the ethical, regulatory and societal implications of genome editing