A host of companies are developing regenerative treatments that lean on stem cells. Seeing an opportunity, Japan’s Fujifilm will build a U.S. stem cell manufacturing facility not only for its own efforts but also as a CDMO.

The company said today that its Fujifilm Cellular Dynamics Inc. (FDCI) subsidiary will invest about $21 million to build a facility in Madison, Wisconsin, to “industrialize” induced pluripotent stem cell technologies for its pipeline of regenerative drugs and to manufacture iPS cells for others. It expects the facility to be ready by March 2020.

“To meet the growing demand for FCDI’s iPS cell platform, the state-of-the-art production facility will have a flexible cell culturing design to serve production requirements of both industrial quantities of cells, and small, diverse batches,” Seimi Satake, FCDI CEO, said in a statement. “By combining Fujifilm’s experience gleaned from the intricate process of manufacturing photographic film along with FCDI’s knowledge of cell reprogramming, genetic engineering and cell differentiation, the facility is poised to address the complex manufacturing processes of cell therapies.”

CRISPR-Cas9 is a revolutionary tool in part because of its versatility: created by bacteria to chew up viruses, it works equally well in human cells to do all sorts of genetic tricks, including cutting and pasting DNA, making pinpoint mutations and activating or inactivating a gene.

WASHINGTON (AP) — Most Americans say it would be OK to use gene-editing technology to create babies protected against a variety of diseases — but a new poll shows they’d draw the line at changing DNA so children are born smarter, faster or taller.

A month after startling claims of the births of the world’s first gene-edited babies in China, the poll by The Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research finds people are torn between the medical promise of a technology powerful enough to alter human heredity and concerns over whether it will be used ethically.

Jaron Keener, a 31-year-old exhibit designer at Pittsburgh’s Carnegie Museum of Natural History, said he’s opposed to “rich people being able to create designer babies.”

CRISPR looks set to be the future of gene editing. But experts are cautioning that this revolutionary technique needs to be developed carefully. So what do the next few years hold?