[Disclosure: AgFunderNews’ parent company AgFunder is an investor in Resurrect Bio]
– UK-based Resurrect Bio—a startup equipping crops with genetic defenses against disease—has announced the initial closing of its Series A round at $8.1 million. This follows a seed round of $2.1 million raised in 2023.
– The investment was led by Corteva through its Corteva Catalyst platform, with participation from Calculus Capital, Pymwymic, UKI2S, SynBioVen, and AgFunder.
– The funds will be spent on accelerating product development and adding to the team.
Why it matters
Over the years, crops have lost the ability to fight certain threats as pathogens have evolved to suppress plants’ innate defense mechanisms, says Resurrect Bio, which was spun out of The Sainsbury Laboratory in Norwich, UK, in 2021. As per the name, the company aims to “resurrect” these capabilities.
Immune receptors in plants, or NLR “helper” and “sensor” proteins, form intricate intracellular networks to create resistance to pathogens. In turn, plant pathogens and pests secrete “effector” proteins that bind with the NLR proteins in a plant, suppressing its immune response and making it more susceptible to disease.
By identifying the proteins in the pathogens that bind with specific NLR proteins in crops, Resurrect Bio can pinpoint precisely where gene edits can be made in the plant to prevent the binding process, effectively locking pathogens out, head of operations Robert Lo Bue tells AgFunderNews.
This effectively enables plants to fight off threats (fungal disease, oomycetes, and nematodes) without the need for chemical crop inputs.
“The theory behind the science is that because we are locking out the pathogen, you can get up to 100% resistance,” says Lo Bue. “Now, of course, it’s an evolutionary arms race and that pathogen will eventually overcome the changes over decades. But our goal is really 100% immunity [in the meantime].”
Breaking the pathogen–plant interaction
While many plant breeding approaches focus narrowly on specific crops and specific traits, Resurrect Bio has developed a more foundational technology that can enable plants to counter multiple threats at once. It can also be applied to multiple plants, says Lo Bue.
“What makes Resurrect Bio unusual is that we can work with any crop, most pathogens, and many pests. The base science is about rapidly discovering the interaction between pathogen and plant and then breaking it, which sets us apart from the competition.
“The magic of it is that some of those changes are as little as [introducing just] one amino acid [change at the binding site of the helper protein]. So as little as one small change will break that interaction and make the plant resistant to the pathogen again.”
The complexity comes from the fact that plants have multiple NLR helpers and sensors, while pathogens and pests in turn may have hundreds of effector proteins, which means thousands of possible molecular interactions, he says. “So it is a process of discovering how they interact; what is unknown is which one actually interacts with the other. That’s our job, essentially.”
How it works
Resurrect Bio’s patented tech – developed by Prof. Sophien Kamoun and his lab, Prof. Tolga Bozkurt, and Dr. Cian Duggan—has three pillars:
👉 FloraFold® proprietary protein-protein AI prediction tool – This has been trained on plant <> pathogen interactions to better predict which proteins in pathogens might bind with which helper proteins in crops.
👉 Rapid screening – The firm’s high throughput, proprietary in-silico [computer simulated] and in-planta [in living plants] platforms screen top candidates identified by FloraFold, says Lo Bue. “We are physically interacting the effector protein from the pathogen with the NLR protein from the plant and seeing how they interact. And we can do that very rapidly at scale.”
👉 Resurrection tech – “Once we have found the interaction,” says Lo Bue, “we identify how you could make small changes in the plant [to prevent the proteins binding].”
Rather than making the edits itself, Resurrect Bio can then give partners—who have the gene editing tools, but not necessarily the targets—precise instructions as to where and how to make the edits needed to “resurrect” plants’ innate immune response, says Lo Bue.
“We essentially make the template for the seed company to implement into their own unique germplasms. Our goal is to find the interaction [and identify how to] break the interaction, but the actual gene editing with technologies such as CRISPR, are not done by us.”
Progress to date… and what’s next
In the early days, Resurrect Bio demonstrated how its tech could confer resistance to potato cyst nematode but has since worked on multiple crops, says Lo Bue.
“Our primary focus is on big hitter crops such as soy, corn, wheat but we’re also looking at things like rice and cotton and brassicas. We have in-house blockbuster traits, kind of the big hitter pathogens impacting widely used crops, but we also have joint development agreements whereby a seed company will come in early on in the research and later have an option to license the trait separately.
“We have a couple of these agreements that will be announced in a few weeks’ time with leading seed companies.”
While the revenue for the blockbuster traits would come from some kind of profit-sharing agreement on the seeds, Resurrect Bio can also make money in the meantime from milestone payments and success payments, he says.
“We’re doing greenhouse trials on a couple of crops right now and originally thought we would have to do quite a lot of greenhouse or field testing. But it hasn’t necessarily seemed to be the case, because the seed companies want to do the trials with their own germplasm.”
Looking ahead, he says, “We’ve promised 18 disease resistance traits in those blockbuster crops in the next three years, plus a step change in our FloraFold AI model. The more we train it on data, the smaller the search scope becomes, and that means the quicker we can find traits.
“And that’s quite significant because some companies will take 10 years to just make one.”
