This week, bioinovation builder Flagship Pioneering unveiled it’s latest company, Terrana Biosciences, which is developing crop protection and enhancement traits in plants through its RNA-based technology platform.
Flagship Pioneering has committed an initial $50 million to Terrana for scale-up and development activities.
According to Ryan Rapp, cofounder and CEO of Terrana Biosciences and origination partner at Flagship, Terrana’s platform will first focus on crop protection traits but has the potential to do much more for plants in the near future, such as delivering drought-tolerance genes or genes that help crop survive very wet or cold conditions.
Rapp cites cherry orchards in the Pacific Northwest as one example. These orchards require multiple hours in temperatures below 45 degrees Fahrenheit each winter; if they don’t get this, they don’t flower well, which impacts fruit quality.
With the Pacific Northwest experiencing warmer winters, growers must either move their operations to Canada or find new genetics, replace existing orchards, then wait a few years to get a crop from the new plants.
“Neither of those [options] is particularly great,” says Rapp. “But we know we know the genes that are responsible for controlling how cold is perceived in these plants. With Terrana’s product, we could go in during the summer, spray these plants to turn that requirement down, and we restore those orchards to productivity during warm winters.”
The platform could also potentially work in the reverse, aiding plants in sub-tropical regions that are becoming too hot for crops historically grown there.
“I see this technology as a huge way to deal with climate change, and to give us a little bit of a more of a foothold,” says Rapp. “Some of the plants we grow are tied to the geographies, and this [technology] gives us a little bit more of a buffer to work with them as we try to find more permanent solutions to climate change.”
‘Prevent, protect, improve’
As the founder of Moderna and other human health-focused companies, Flagship Pioneering has a long history of working with RNA-based products and technologies.
Terrana is an opportunity to apply that RNA knowledge to the agriculture space, says Rapp.
“The biggest challenge [in agriculture] in the past has been that when RNA has been applied, it’s typically been messenger RNA, or double-stranded RNAs, sometimes hairpins,” says Rapp.
Instead of entering the plant, these RNA molecules sit on the leaves and degrade quickly.
“The difference with Terrana’s technology is it actually goes inside the plant,” he says. “That really lets you think about solving problems differently.”
After being sprayed on, the RNA enters the plant through small tears in the leaves. With this method, Terrana can load in RNAs that act as “programmable plant vaccines” or proteins that can aid in insect resistance or antifungal capabilities, for example.
So far, the company has created three novel technology classes, or what Rapp calls “the prevent, protect, and improve platform.”
With the first (“prevent”) small RNA molecules can carry a little bit of RNA that teaches the plant’s immune system how to deal with viruses it hasn’t seen before. When said viruses do show up, the plant’s immune system is already primed to protect it, much in the way that a vaccine would, he says. Terrana is working with tomato plants in this space.
The “protect” platform is for “when you might already have disease or the plant has already been exposed to something like a bacteria or a fungus and you want to take care of it,” says Rapp.
“These are chassis that are capable of carrying small peptides or proteins and delivering them to the plant in order to help it protect itself.”
The final platform, “improved,” is being built to deliver “all the traditional things people have been using in agriculture,” such as cry proteins or drought genes, to name a couple.
Reducing reliance on chemistry
While Terrana is developing its platform to be compatible with existing crop protection products (chemical and biological), Rapp believes it will eventually help growers reduce their reliance on chemistry in the future.
For example, he says, growers in Brazil are currently spraying soybean crops roughly 16 times per year to control Asian soybean rust and other fungal pathogens.
Because Terrana’s product persists in the plant, the company is hoping to develop products that offer the same level of protection with just one spray per cropping season.
“This would help us move away from some of these chemistries that we’re so heavily reliant on while putting another tool in the arsenal to manage resistance and make growers lives easier,” notes Rapp.
Terrana has demonstrated proof of concept in tomatoes, corn, and soy, and generated a pipeline of more than potential products in specialty and row crops, he adds.
The company will now move into more scale up and testing activities, which Rapp says will be the bulk of its focus for the near term.
