While Doudna was involved in some of commercial ventures, she also felt that a nonprofit institute could play a unique role in driving the science forward and helping develop ethical guidelines and equitable access to gene-editing technology in ways that market-driven companies would not, particularly because CRISPR held so much promise for addressing rare diseases that had often been neglected by the pharmaceutical industry.

At the same time, new sources of funding allowed the institute expanded its scope to apply CRISPR and other genomic technologies to plants and agriculture, and the IGI brought in Brian Staskawicz as the director of this program.

[26][27][16] In addition to providing testing, the IGI awarded funding to support research studies into COVID-19 biology, epidemiology, public health impact, as well as novel diagnostics and therapeutic approaches.

[1] Doudna has said that the IGI's experience with the COVID-19 response and rapid large-team science changed the way the institute selected projects moving forward because it showed how much impact can be made when researchers work together on a common goal.

[36] The wave of discoveries of additional genome-editing tools with different properties, including new Cas proteins and techniques like base editing, was sometimes called "CRISPR 2.0" in popular science reporting.

[53][54] The IGI sustainable agriculture program and its Plant Genomics and Transformation Facility has developed CRISPR protocols for editing over 30 common crop species,[17] and has worked on developing applications including protecting the world's chocolate supply from cacao swollen shoot virus,[55][56] removing toxic cyanide precursors in cassava,[57] and improving drought tolerance in rice.

The Chan Zuckerberg Initiative committed $11 million to the IGI to support research on CRISPR-based approaches to enhancing the ability of plants and soils to remove and sequester atmospheric carbon.

[10][60] At the 2023 TED conference in Vancouver, it was announced that the IGI was selected for funding by the Audacious Project and the institute received $70 million from donors to develop microbiome editing tools that can be applied to real-world problems related to human health and climate change.

[16] In 2022, the IGI convened a group of 30 experts from diverse fields, including biotech, economics, manufacturing, venture capital, and intellectual property, to develop a plan to improve the affordability of genetic medicines.