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Who leads AgBiome?
Founded in 2012 by Scott Uknes, Eric Ward, Jeff Dangl, John Ryals, and Paul Schulze-Lefert, AgBiome analyzes crop microbiomes to develop new crop protection products and traits. Uknes (Co-CEO) earned his PhD in Plant Molecular Biology at WUSTL under David Ho and was a licensing lead at Bayer CropScience after Athenix was acquired by Bayer. Before that, he co-founded Cropsolution to develop fungicides and Paradigm Genetics to use functional genomics in agriculture. He also worked at what would become Syngenta. Ward (Co-CEO) co-founded Cropsolution with Uknes as CEO, and began his career at Syngenta and earned his PhD at WUSTL as well.
What does AgBiome do?
AgBiome develops biological products and traits centered around the plant microbiome. Focused on row crops, AgBiome has built a platform to identify plant-associated microbes that have fungicidal, insecticidal, and nematicidal activity. These leads enter their pipeline to ultimately become products for plant health, pest resistance and higher yield.
The crop microbiome has been shown to impact plant health, availability of resources, and ability to resist infections and other stresses. As a result microbial products can increase crop productivity while reducing the number of chemical inputs required. Plant-based microbes come in 2 major classes:
Endophyte - microbes that are inside plants
Rhizosphere - microbes within the soil that interact with plant roots
Plants have a core microbiome, that is associated with a given crop under all environmental conditions, that has been established through co-evolution. For something like wheat or corn, the first step is identifying their core microbiome and developing new treatments ranging from microbes to bioactive metabolites to augment this core population. Plant microbial products are often ineffective due to variability of environmental conditions; a microbe might not be able to colonize the host plant, the microbe might be selected out of a population from competition, variable microbial phenotypes, among others. Some of the opportunities to solve these issues are:
Using functional genomics to map cause-effect relationships between a crop and its core microbiome. This would map out a genotype with a phenotype(s).
What metabolites are used for plant-microbe communication? Which ones influence plant health and growth?
Developing new tools to promote microbial colonization and maintenance
AgBiome has built a wide-ranging platform, called Genesis, integrating plant genomics with breeding and gene editing to characterize the plant microbiome to do this. One major approach is to invent tools and develop products that target the core plant microbiome. On the tools side, AgBiome has more scalable plant screening methods and a growing database of plant genomes. On the products side, the company uses these tools to hone in on microbes with a particular biological activity. In the long run, the goal is to map out microbiome and their plant and soil interactions.
The company has 2 major products: Howler and Theia (both fungicides) with the former commercial and the latter expected to launch in 2021:
Howler is AgBiome’s first approved product. It is a biological fungicide with comparable effects to chemical products. However, Howler contains living organisms imbuing a unique mode-of-action from synthetic products.
Theia is the company’s second fungicide product and is complementary to Howler to deal with resistance.
With this platform and a series of products, AgBiome is helping growers protect their crops from insects, fungal infections, nematodes, and disease in general. This work has helped the company build one of the largest plant microbiome databases in the world, which will set up more commercial partnerships and products.
What makes AgBiome unique?
AgBiome has not only built a compelling agtech platform but has one of the most unique organizational structures in life sciences. On the latter, AgBiome has no managers; rather, the company uses committees of employees to handle core functions like business development and financials. Eric Ward (Co-CEO) took the lead to implement this structure after reading a management paper on the advantages of a non-hierarchical structure. Seems to be working.
On the platform-side, AgBiome is a leader in the plant microbiome. The company has 8 approved products to solve resistance for plant infections. This is powered by the Genesis platform, which is focused on isolating and screening a large collection of plant-associated microbes. AgBiome sequences the genome for each of these microbes along with their corresponding lab and field trial results. However, establishing the connection between a microbe and a field trial test is still a rate limiting step for agtech companies in general. New models to accurately recapitulate these experiments in a lab would bring more transformative products to growers.
AgBiome’s work creates a pretty large database of microbes (over 80K and growing by 10Ks annually) and their effects on crops. AgBiome has been able to prove they can develop new products from their platform. The company is now in a great position to license microbes in their database along with larger commercial partnerships with companies like Bayer and Corteva. For example, AgBiome has a strategic partnership with Genective to develop new traits to protect plants from insects. The company also has a collaboration with Elanco Animal Health to develop new products for swine. AgBiome has also licensed its gene editing technology to LifeEDIT Therapeutics, under the ElevateBio umbrella, to develop cell and gene therapies.
Why I like what AgBiome is doing?
AgBiome has proven the power of microbiome engineering in plants and is becoming a leader in crop protection. One part of this success is the team and their experience in agtech, and the other part is their Genesis platform that catalogs plant-associated microbes and their effects.
AgBiome is a case study on the power of scaling up screening in agtech - the company brings the power of screening, gene editing, and breeding to plants. However, there is still a very large opportunity to shorten the feedback cycle from a sequenced genome to a field trial. The company showed the microbiome can be predictably engineered in plants. The last step would be doing this for humans.
You can find AgBiome here.