A pair of announcements this week shed light on Pairwise’s plans for applying its gene editing technology to improve plant breeding in the agbio space.
This week, Pairwise closed a $40 million Series C funding round that was led by Deerfield Management. The round also included some returning investors, including Aliment Capital and Leaps by Bayer, as well as Corteva, a global agricultural technology company, that is a new investor in the round.
Separately, Corteva is partnering with Pairwise focused on developing and delivering gene edited crops to farmers. The company has made a $25 million equity investment in Pairwise under the umbrella of Corteva Catalyst, its new investment and partnership platform focused on agricultural innovation. This marks the first joint venture and major equity investment in gene editing through the Catalyst initiative.
The investment is intended to expand the reach and benefits of gene editing to a wide variety of staple and specialty crops. Tom Adams, Pairwise CEO and co-founder, told GEN in an interview that the company will focus on creating edited versions of Corteva’s biggest crops specifically corn. The companies will join forces over the next five years in a venture that will leverage their respective gene editing capabilities to generate and evaluate crops that are more resilient to extreme weather events and changing climate conditions. In that time frame, Pairwise will deliver several traits that Corteva can develop further and test over the next several years.
“We view gene editing as a critical solution to drive climate resilience across agriculture and global food systems. Pairwise is an obvious choice for our investment to help accelerate innovation through gene editing in fruit, vegetables, and specialty crops. And as leaders in gene editing ourselves,” said Sam Eathington, Corteva’s chief technology and digital officer. “Corteva’s ultimate aim is to work with Pairwise to unlock the impact of this technology to help solve climate challenges and produce the food, fiber, and fuel required to meet the needs of a growing global population.”
Besides Corteva, Pairwise continues to work with agricultural giant Bayer, a partnership that began several years ago. As part of that collaboration, Pairwise has delivered 27 unique traits in corn, soybean, wheat, and canola plants to Bayer that the company is now developing. For example, Pairwise scientists worked on traits in short corn that resulted in plants that are more resilient and high yield.
Adams expects his company will work on similar kinds of projects as part of the partnership with Corteva. “For a grower, it’s really all about productivity and yield and trying to create more, more output for less input,” he said. “The traits that we’ll be working on will be the things that can help to drive productivity.” And an added benefit is the lower cost to growers of farming these edited crops. Those savings can then be passed on to consumers.
Funding for Fulcrum, other projects
According to Adams, a portion of the series C funds will be used to continue improving the efficiency of the Fulcrum™ Platform, Pairwise’s gene editing technology. The platform includes company-developed gene editing tools for cutting, base editing, and templated editing.
With Fulcrum, “we’re able to do traditional knockout but also base editing and, and creating allelic variance that matches things that are understood in nature,” he said. Furthermore, “gene editing marries really well with breeding. [Agbio companies] have all of this variation that they’re trying to select for. Gene editing allows you to take some of the randomness out of it and create new outcomes more efficiently.”
In addition to developing Fulcrum, Pairwise will also invest some of the funds in developing its portfolio of gene-edited crops. Specifically, its scientists are developing seedless blackberries. To be clear, this seems to be something that consumers want. Besides improvements in taste, 85% of people surveyed by the company said they would prefer blackberries without seeds. In addition to lacking seeds, Pairwise will also make edits that will allow farmers to grow more blackberry plants per area resulting in higher overall yields.
Seedless blackberries are still a few years away from launch and this is where Pairwise scientists are currently spending most of their time. But there are other products in the works. Pairwise also has plans to develop cherries without pits. The company has already launched one product—edited mustard greens that were released to the public last year. In May of this year, Pairwise inked a product licensing agreement with Bayer to bring those products to the market.
“We’re really excited to be in a position where we’ve got partnerships with the two biggest commodities seed companies, and we’ve got this pipeline of really interesting fruits and vegetables,” Adams said. “The technology’s going to make, I think, a massive impact in the next few years.“
