All right, I think we can get started. So first of all, thank you for coming to our panel where we're going to really have a great education on gene editing, and its applications within agriculture. Before we get started, I always like to know my audience. Could I just get a show of hands here of folks here that have an understanding of genetic engineering and gene editing in general? Okay, so we've got a pretty well-informed audience. Okay, that's great. Well, we are in the presence of some illustrious leaders in the space, and they're going to share some of their insight with us. I'm going to make an introduction to each one of them so that you know who we're talking to, and I'm going to ask each of them to describe the business that they're leading.
First of all, my name's Ivan Saval, and I head up the investment banking practice at Roth for all things agribusiness, including ag tech. To my right is Amit Dhingra, and he is the Chief Science Officer at Moolec Science, and he leads the molecular farming platform within the company. Moolec is working on some very interesting technologies that you're going to hear about. He's been involved with molecular farming for over two decades in the academic world. He specializes in understanding gene expression in plants, and his academic program focuses on genomics and biotechnology. He has extensive experience in utilizing both nuclear and chloroplast genetic engineering strategies to express proteins in various types of plants. Moolec is a protein play, which you're going to hear about, and they're really revolutionizing the plant and animal protein ingredient-based business. To his right is Gastón Paladini. He's from Argentina.
Thank you for flying here from Argentina. He is the CEO of Nasdaq-listed Moolec Science, a flagship molecular farming technology company in the ingredients industry, which brings animal protein benefits to the plant protein ingredient complex, aiming to enhance flavor and texture of existing plant protein inputs, including the soybean. So they're going to talk to you today about what they're doing with the soybean by inputting an animal protein-type technology. He has deep experience in agriculture, currently also acting as a board member to his family's business, which is the largest processed meat producer in Latin America for the last 12 years. So he brings a unique understanding of how we need to be disruptive in the meat production industry globally, and it was one of his key motivations for starting Moolec some time ago. To his right is Peter Beetham. Peter is co-founder of Cibus.
Cibus is a really unique business model whereby they're democratizing gene editing traits for seed companies around the world. He has over 30 years of experience in agriculture technology. Before joining Cibus, Dr. Beetham was research director of the Plant and Industrial Products Division at ValiGen and a senior scientist at Kimeragen, where he led research teams exploring gene targeting and DNA repair. Part of his extensive research experience was at the Boyce Thompson Institute at Cornell University, where he was a postdoctoral scientist and one of the pioneers of the early work that led to Cibus's technologies. So as you can see, we have a great panel here to answer any questions that you may have around how gene editing is influencing agriculture once we get into this.
If you do have questions, while we're going through our conversation, please feel free to raise your hand and ask while we're going along. Otherwise, we will have time after our conversation for Q&A. So why don't we go into this and have each one of you discuss what your company does so you can give a bit more color for the audience for the benefit of their knowledge, and then we'll get into our conversation around gene editing. So Peter, why don't you go first?
Thanks so much, Ivan. Really appreciate the invitation to participate in this panel. It's ironic that we got rained on in Southern California on the tennis courts. We talk about climate change, and I think one of the things you'll hear about is a number of technologies that we're bringing to the table at Cibus that addresses some of the challenges that farmers have. So, just a couple of words on Cibus. I, I am one of the founders. We started in 2001. We're based in San Diego. We are about 185 employees. We're going to a couple of locations. But fundamentally, we're an independent trait developer. So we're developing traits for in seeds for farmers to improve their productivity. We are a B2B. We have business-to-business with seed companies.
And when you think about our business model, it is a royalty business model where we provide seeds back to seed companies, with a new characteristic, which we call a trait, that brings value to both the seed company and to the farmer, to make every acre more productive. So whether it's disease resistance or, or herbicide tolerance, for them to manage their weeds, allows them to use less chemistry. So we say we replace chemistry with biology, and that allows every acre to be more productive. The other side of it, so that's a royalty-based business. And then the last thing I'd say, before we get into the conversation around Cibus is that, we've been around a long time. We've developed a really core technology to be accurately making letter changes in genomes. So when you think about Cibus, we're actually making spelling changes in genes.
What that allows us to do is to provide complex multigenic traits. So things like disease resistance are not just a gene knockout. They're often multiple edits. And so our first products, I'll talk about as developed traits, the ones we've tested in the field and that we're handing back to partners as we speak, in canola and winter oilseed rape, pod shatter reduction, reducing the shattering of the pod, like peas in a pod at the end of the harvest of canola. It's a multi-edited trait. We're also doing two traits in rice for weed management, two herbicide-tolerant traits. Again, multiple changes that require a really complex technology but also deliver really great traits to the market. So I'll leave it there as an introduction. Thanks, Ivan.
You should think of Cibus as Apple has their own store of applications. They're creating what's essentially a trait store. So the seed companies globally will be able to work with Cibus. They will send them their germplasm and very effectively, efficiently, and quickly modify those seeds for pest management, pest disease control, send it back to the channel to be sold, and they will collect a royalty off of every sale. So it's a very unique business model, and it's only now that the technologies are advanced enough in order for Cibus to capitalize on operating leverage to bring down the cost so that parties can apply gene editing technology that otherwise they may not be able to do. Gastón, can you tell us a little bit about Moolec?
Sure. Well, thank you, Ivan, for the invitation. Thank you, Roth. I'm going to say it's a pleasure to be here. Thank you, the audience, to be here, in real life, at this time of the day. Well, Moolec is a science-based, food ingredient company. We apply science for sustainable food. We use molecular farming techniques. Amit will talk about that later. But in short, we produce animal proteins in plants. We believe there is nothing better than plants to produce foreign proteins, to produce proteins. There is nothing better than photosynthesis to produce it in an affordable way. And there's nothing more scalable to produce this protein in soybeans, to scale up these proteins in soybeans. So, we focus on porcine and bovine proteins, firstly in porcine proteins, in soybeans. And we combine these two proteins for the food applications, mostly processed meat.
As Ivan told you, I'm very well acquainted with the traditional meat industry. I know from the inside, from my family business, that this is what the food producers need to produce sustainable and affordable products. We are just modifying the seed at the very beginning of the value chain. And then we respect the whole value chain. And I think that personally, I truly believe that we need to find alternative solutions to produce the same and natural thing and not to mimic or get substitutions and fake ingredients. We need to produce real, natural ingredients. The question is, could we use science and technology to replicate nature? The answer is yes, it's doable, and we are getting into. So, thank you, Ivan, and looking forward to a great discussion.
When I invited Moolec to be on the panel, I was really excited to have them on here because they're doing something really unique. If you think about the meat protein industry, what's its number one pinch point? It's spoilage. However, there's a certain nutrient profile that you can only obtain through animal protein. And in order to extend that animal protein to food deserts or impoverished geographies around the world, they have discovered a way to put animal protein into the soybean, thereby capturing some of the animal protein benefits, which is going to be hugely beneficial to other geographies. And they're really going to disrupt the specialty ingredients business. So they've taken the spoilage concern with meat production and have now put it inside of a soybean seed, which essentially has a two-year shelf life. So it's really, really novel and very neat.
Amit, I'd like for you to talk about what's some of the differentiation between plant breeding and gene editing and maybe educate the audience a little bit on why gene editing matters.
Sure. First of all, good afternoon. Thank you for being here. Thank you, Ivan and Roth, for having us. So there are three things we are talking about here: genetic engineering, gene editing, and plant breeding. They are not mutually exclusive. You can actually utilize all three together. One of the challenges today is, as you all have experienced, extreme weather, climate change, you know, conditions are really affecting our farmers. So food supply, food security is becoming a big concern. So utilizing these three approaches and I'll elaborate briefly what it is. So gene editing is where we can precisely rewrite the DNA bases. So, English alphabet has 26 letters. DNA has four. And now we have technologies which were actually developed back in the 1990s, which have been now applied to plants and animals. You must have heard sickle cell anemia has been cured.
That's through gene editing as well. So that's on the human side, of course. But on the plant side, which is a little bit more trickier, so I really have a huge respect for what Cibus is doing. It's not a straightforward process in plants. So that's rewriting DNA by using CRISPR-Cas9 or similar such enzymes. And then the second part is genetic engineering, which is inserting genes or deleting genes from the plant. That involves insertion or deletion of DNA inside the plant. And plant breeding is the same old, thousands of years old, where you can cross plants, cross-pollinate plants, and you can have a gene-edited plant as a parent or a genetically engineered plant as a parent. And imagine the powerhouse we can have of combining multiple traits because that's what's really needed for us to keep producing food sustainably.
Thank you. So you apply different technologies in the area of gene editing, you have taking DNA, taking parts of the DNA sequencing out to get the trait expression that you're seeking, or you're inserting foreign DNA to get the type of trait expression that you're seeking. One may be considered GMO. Maybe one may be considered non-GMO. Peter, can you talk us a little bit about the difference between the gene editing techniques?
Excuse me. Sorry. I've been talking too much all day because this excites me, and that's why I'm, you know, I love the idea of when you think about gene editing. I'm going to have to get a drink of water. I'm sorry. There's one in my bag there. Oh, thank you. I'm so sorry.
But it's important for you to understand the distinction between the two because the next conversation, topic is going to be where are we on the, the social license, the adoption curve, even though we may be at certain regulatory thresholds, most recently in Europe, and accepting these, New Genomic Techniques. It still raises the question as to whether or not we have the social license. But we before we get into that adoption curve, I'd like for Peter to talk a little bit about the two different techniques.
Thank you. Sorry about that. So gene editing, I always like to think of it as the modern technology. There's nothing against transgenics, but it was developed in the 1990s. There was lots of really good reasons. What I'm enjoying hearing from Moolec is that, they're using an application that I think was always possible but had so many restrictions over time. So it's a great application of that technology. What we all knew, back in the 1990s was that as we started to understand genomes and as we understood, the detail around genetic sequences, that there's an opportunity to fast-track plant breeding. You know, what has happened with conventional plant breeding for hundreds of years is selecting new characteristics in the plant breeding program. Most of those are associated with really small changes in the genome. The genetic potential in crops is enormous.
With all this information we have at our fingertips now, we didn't have a tool to actually be able to go in and edit and make those spelling changes, and we do now. That's the exciting part for us, you know, that if you think about the crops that we talk about a 2% increase in yield or a 3% increase in yield, the actual genetic potential is at least double what they have. Understanding those genes and being able to provide new characteristics allows you to really think about productivity on every acre of land. Being able to do those small changes is essentially, like Ivan said, adding apps to the phone. I think that's a really good analogy of what we think how we think about crops that we're dealing with. So canola, rice, soy, corn, wheat.
That's the areas that we're focused on. So it's a very different technique because we're using the knowledge that's already within the plant, whereas Moolec, you know, I see as a completely new characteristic.
Maybe, Amit, you can talk about the insertion of DNA. It's very different than Cibus's approach, which is taking stuff out, just keeping it very high level. And I think that's where the potential consumer education will be required is understanding what you're doing with the gene editing approach.
Yes. Sure. I can speak to that. I hope everybody's aware that 98% of soybean grown in the United States today have a gene for some sort of herbicide resistance, right? It helps the farmer, right? It really allows the farmer to grow a massive crop. And what we are doing is, on top of that, bringing another protein, which is completely from, like, of course, porcine from the pig. And one thing I just wanted to say is our knowledge is becoming more and more in-depth where we know what genes do. Just letters of ATGCs is one part, but our knowledge is becoming increasingly more and more in-depth and broad. And that's where Cibus can take that and say, this particular gene, which is native to soybean, if we made a change in DNA, it will make it more productive.
Similarly, we know that, for example, this is publicly available knowledge, myoglobin protein is the one that provides the trait that a consumer would like, right? It's the flavor. It's the mouthfeel, the aroma of meaty aroma. So we can now take that gene and insert that in soybean. I just wanted to add a question. I'm an academic, so I always ask a question, just to keep it light. How many of you know the answer to this question? What is the percentage of real meat in ground meat-produced sausages and patties?
20%.
20%? Sorry, 50%? It could be any, depending on the quality. What is the rest of it? Fat? What else? Filling? What is the filling, ma'am? Oatmeal? Did you say oatmeal? I wish. Actually, it is soy-derived protein. It is soybean protein, and it is basically a texturized vegetable protein that forms it. Imagine that we take that protein that is just direct protein from the soy, but now we replace it with the animal protein, which is in the soy itself. So this is I also wanted to answer the question what we do. I always like to say it very simply is we are really replacing the bland soy protein with tasty, meaty protein. You want to add something?
Yes. The iron deficiency, you know? That's very important. Nutrition. Of course, one of the main drivers in food is taste, huh? We want to eat good food, tasty, huh? But the second one the second driver is nutrition. What we are doing with our products is, increasing the, the iron content, their natural iron content from the animal into the plant system.
It's really interesting. We can pass around these seeds that they have, prepared.
Do you want to?
No, just send it on the vials. I'll pass around the room.
Oh, it would be quite hard to recognize it here, but.
You'll see, one is the soybean, and the other one is the soybean seed that Moolec has created. And that red tint is a protein that is able to express iron. So they've encapsulated the benefits of animal protein inside the soybeans. Very interesting here.
I want to say, iron deficiency has been the biggest problem for, you know, women to bear children, for pregnant women, but also for infant mortality. This can solve that problem for the world as well.
Well, all of this is very interesting. Yes, go ahead.
I'm sorry if I missed this. But just explicitly, does the process will it be able to go through or be classified as non-GMO, or does it come under?
No.
So.
Proudly GMO. We are fully transparent. We are applying all the regulatory pathways, to get this product approved. We are quite honest to the customers about what we are doing. We are using GM techniques for good purposes. We want to skip animal, livestock, feed-to-food conversion inefficiency process, gas emissions by getting these animal proteins, inside the plants.
That is a great segue into the adoption curve conversation. This is the conversation that needs to happen much more broadly than what's in this room, which is understanding the benefits of GMO and not just, you know, casting negativity on it. So perhaps this is Amit, you can speak a little bit about the GMO benefits being used, with your seed.
Yeah. So, and Gastón, please add after I'm done. The big part is that this is a novel trait. There's no doubt. However, if you look at what's been happening over the last 3-4 years, there's been a big push to have more sustainable production of protein. This is as sustainable as it can get. We can store protein. We can actually remove cold chains for storing the meat as well. Now, we are also following two regulatory pathways. One is because it's a GM. So as Gastón earlier mentioned, we're going through the USDA regulation process, as well as we are talking to FDA as well. We've eaten meat with soybean forever. Now, the difference is the protein is in there. So there could be a curve. However, it seems like the younger generation is more accepting of genetically modified foods, one.
Secondly, the taste really speaks for itself. So going back to my question initially, if your sausage is tastier and your burger patty is tastier, even with soy protein, one, it's a sustainably produced product, and taste really has driven, if you don't believe me, look around. What do you go and repurchase every time? What do you experience positively in terms of taste? Gastón?
Well, to add on top of that, I want to say that most of the food producers, the big, big players in the industry, has a clear path to use bioengineered ingredients. Let's take Europe aside for a moment because it's totally different in Europe. But mostly in the US, South America, Central America, Asia are quite okay to use bioengineered ingredients. You only need to get your products approved and be transparent, mostly proving traceability. And what I can add is that we haven't received any pushback so far about our approach. We are in active conversations with the market. And I also want to add on top of that that the young consumers are very optimistic on how science and technology could overcome the major challenges in the planet, generally speaking.
So we believe that the new generation will embrace science, especially what happened with COVID and the pandemic put us in a very good spot to continue proving that science could definitely help us to overcome the major challenges in the planet, specifically in food. Well, I personally think that we haven't reached what plants can do and biotech can do in food. So the best is yet to come, Ivan.
Yeah, I do agree. We're sort of in the early innings here. Peter, can you talk a little bit about Cibus's role in really revolutionizing the seed industry and what impact that might have on the seed industry, as it relates to improving the types of crops that are going to be planted through your process?
So thanks, Ivan. I think the seed industry, globally has been, impacted by, you know, a lot of the major ag chem companies. I think about 40% of the world's seeds are produced by them. What's interesting is, you know, our ability, to add new characteristics to, seeds. I like your term democratization of the technology because essentially we've got 10 customers already in, canola for our pod shatter reduction trait. We've got a number of customers, 3 officially in rice and more coming. That allows us to impact, you know, a global market. And I think the adoption is based on the fact that we're able to add new characteristics to seeds that are valuable in the market, you know, by replacing the chemistry with biology that brings total value to the farmer, which we really you know, that's been our vision all along.
The size of the trait industry over the last 20 years has been really down to the GMO traits, like herbicide tolerance and insect tolerance. It's an $8 billion royalty market every year. You know, even Corteva has said, publicly that they were trying to get rid of $640 million payment that they make every year to licensing traits. The trait market is really valuable, because it does add to that seed business. You know, we don't need to have more acres. We just need to make all the acres we have more productive. That's where the seed business comes in with high-quality seeds that can address the problems of the farmer, the constraints to production, but also add some really great value.
So, you know, we're also working in sustainability areas as a sort of third tier to what we do, and, you know, being able to provide oil profiles that are associated with different ingredients. So sustainable ingredients is something we can also do with our technology, understanding that you can modify oil profiles. Things like non-allergenic peanut is a classic example of what we can do. So, you know, this is a market where right now Cibus is very much focused on productivity traits, but there's lots of things in the seed industry that then can create more value in that industry globally.
Amit, can you talk about you touched on sustainability, which is, I think, a huge byproduct of this technology, whether it be, CRISPR-Cas or insertion or transgenic. Amit, can you speak a little bit about what your view is on how sustainability is folded into what Moolec is trying to do?
Sure. Actually, if you don't mind, I think this is where Gastón's story as a fourth-generation meat producer could start off, and I can add that later. Gastón, after you.
Well, I don't know. Well, yes. Well, my family business, started 100 years ago. And at that point in time, you know, nobody was talking about sustainability and how we measure gases or carbon footprint, water footprint, so on. But now it's quite a thing. And let me go back to the new generations. My kids, the fifth generation of Paladini, is definitely putting sustainability on top of everything, you know? How we produce what we consume is the main question for new generations. So for me, it's all about getting the same risk, the same output with a totally different approach. By producing meat protein genes in plants, we could, we don't need to feed animals, raise animals, and kill animals. And that's the most harmful part of the whole process. Amit, please continue.
Yeah. Well, thank you. I think this really builds up on so sustainability means several things. Of course, profitability is one of those. Ideas of farmers are involved in this. They obviously get extra value for producing it. But more than that, if you really look at a global scale, this product that we have, meat protein, really provides nutrition to around the world. And soybean has grown all around the world. So if you take any technology, I think I would say Cibus's technology also, these are when you start working with seeds, you have opened up scalability that is global in scale rather than regional or local. So to be able to produce nutritional nutrition-providing protein, which can be stored on the shelf, which provides the nutrition profile. I come from India, a lot of people who are vegetarian, there's always some sort of deficiency in nutrition.
I grew up with my mother trying to treat that in malnutrition in women all the time. So I think this is, in that sense, sustainability is also to sustain ourselves as a population, as a people. So these are some ideas that come along. And now, if Peter developed a drought-tolerant and a stress-tolerant soybean, we can cross, coming back to that plant breeding part, our Piggy Sooy, and that's what we call it, together, now we can grow it anywhere in the world as well. So that's the environmental sustainability piece.
Thank you for that. Another topic of discussion, I think, with the capital community is when they look at an emerging asset class, which is what I sort of characterized this as, is where do you think we are as it relates to concept, to full growth industry, where if you look at the company lifecycle and you apply that to an industry lifecycle, where do you think we are in sort of the gene editing complex?
So I think if you were to use a baseball analogy, I think we're about on the fifth or sixth inning. I think, you know, for Cibus, we've got products that we're handing back to our customers. And so for us, the next year will be the first year we see products in the market around canola. You know, I always talk about the group at Cibus. We're kids in a candy store. That's an American thing from an Australian. But it really is the opportunities are wildly broad, but also hugely valuable. And so I think over the next few years, you're going to see gene editing really take off.
One of the big drivers of that is what's happened in Europe just recently in early February, where the European Parliament voted to support new laws that are going to be applied for what they call new genomic techniques, NGTs. So I think, you know, what drives that profitability and that process for the industry is a regulatory framework that allows these products to get to market. For us at least, that is very specific to having products that are indistinguishable from what occurs in nature or comes from plant breeding programs. And that's something I think when you think about Cibus and when we work with customers, we're working with their best genetics. We're working with their elite genetics that allows them to get to market faster than what they would if they were doing the old traditional GMO.
So, you know, I think we're accelerating towards the eighth inning. But I think that's where we are as an industry. And I think globally, the harmonizing of the regulatory framework is hugely valuable for everyone in this industry because it's not just cultivation. It's trade as well. It's import, export. And when you're dealing in commodity crops like we are, that's a really important aspect of that harmonization.
Thank you for that. I have many conversations with investors, and that's always a question as to whether this is an early stage industry or if it's at a stage of maturity. And that analogy being sort of fifth or sixth inning, that resonates. Amit, we are really dealing with an industry that's technologically enabled. We would not have been doing such technology results as long as, as recently as 10 years ago. I'd like to hear your views on, you know, what has advanced in the last 10 years to allow Moolec to exist today that may not have been able to exist in, say, 2010? And then if you could get your sort of crystal ball, where do you think the industry and technological innovations are going in the next 10 years?
Wow, crystal ball question. Definitely. I will attempt to answer the crystal ball. But let me get to first, where are we 10 years where were we 10 years ago? At that time, GM technology so that was 2014, right? The GM technology was getting more and more acceptable. It hadn't reached the level it is today. Of course, there was a lot of opposition to GM in the 20. I did a lot of public speaking, just educating public consumers out in, like, libraries, etc. There was a lot of back and forth. But today, that voice has kind of went away because people are realizing they cannot keep growing food because at the end of the day, civilizations end when food's not available. So food security has become a key point for everybody. So that's my simple answer to that.
And the second, the crystal ball: let's imagine a world where we don't have the weather patterns that we are used to, and now we have to really produce food for masses. You've heard the story, 9 billion people or 10 billion people, depending on the number. We need to grow 70% more food with 30% less land. So this is where we need to start talking about resilience in our crops that can withstand all of this. But also, are we going to use the same land for people or for food? So we really need to increase the productivity of every inch of land, whatever we can produce, and thereby adding value. So this is just us starting with this protein.
I think there will be a big, massive uptake of multiple crops producing additional traits other than just the ability to grow for the farmer because already the trend is shifting from the farmer to farmer plus consumer. That's my little take on that. Gastón, do you have any thoughts?
Well, yes, I want to bring the climate change issue, you know, as like it's a big issue. We are all aware of that. And because of that, I think that the world is embracing new solutions. I'm not sure. I do not have the crystal ball to fully know, you know, when we will have our technology in a mature way. You know, I really don't know. But what I do know is that we need to put all the technologies on the table to overcome the major challenges in terms of climate change, in terms of food security, in terms of affordability. We need to feed the world. And we are not talking about calories. And we are talking about nutrition. We're talking about proteins. How we are going to address these big goals?
Well, we have only one planet, and we need to figure it out. So I think timing is great for this kind of tech. It would be totally different 10 years ago. Now we understand. We have the information. We are proving that this is doable and this is safe, not only for human consumption, also for the world. So I think it's perfect timing.
Thank you for that. Peter, if you sort of had to think where maybe 10 years is too far out on the horizon, but, you know, in the next 3-5 years, where do you see the science of gene editing going? And what do you think the benefits are? And why do you think it matters?
So, Ivan, I think, again, without the crystal ball, but why it matters, it's there's so many things that are happening in ag tech in general. And I think, you know, one of the things the pandemic really brought home to a lot of us was supply chains. Food on the supermarket shelves was pretty important. So, you know, understanding the ag technology, everything from AI to digital farming, everything has really started to take off in agriculture where understanding that it's so important that we do make every acre more productive, we start utilizing some of the commodities more effectively. So plant proteins have become sort of at the forefront. So I think in the next few years, what you're going to see is a lot more plant-based products.
What that means is, in general, the seed industry is going to have to address how to get those products on the market, how to help farmers understand how to grow that. As I said before, we're kids in a candy store when it comes to gene editing. But there's some really fundamental things that we have to continue to do well. And gene editing, in my mind, allows us to start addressing the changing environments that we do in farming. We can, you know, the combination of whether you're working with companies like Moolec or other companies that are thinking about replacing plantation crops or different oil profiles. So there's I really think there are so many sustainability, human health, and fuel applications. But we've got to make sure that we do it well within the food systems that we do have.
I just wanted to add, we're talking about planet Earth. That's what Gastón reminded me. I know scientists are now working actively on also trying to see if we can grow plants during spaceflight missions on the planets. I don't know that will happen or not, but I do know one thing. As the technology is developed for that type of application, it will certainly change how we grow food on this planet.
When we think about stewardship of the environment, that often falls into the hands of government bodies and regulatory bodies specifically. Peter, you had mentioned that the European Union recently, the Parliament had approved the uses of New Genomic Techniques. That's no comment to say lightly. If anyone has any experience or awareness of the European Union and their regulatory processes to permit this technology, it is a real validation. I want to spend some time talking about that because it took years to get to this point of adoption. Peter, can you just provide a little bit of history on EU's evolution in understanding and comfort?
So I think Europe's interesting in so many ways with regards to new technologies, particularly in seeds and genetics. So, you know, for so many years, they had a law that was basically the deliberate release of anything that had been genetically modified. It was 2001/18, the law. It was developed in the 1990s around new technology at the time. And the frustrating part about that history was that, you know, I started working with competent authorities in Europe. I was the European Food Safety Authority's expert on gene editing in 2007. And we thought within a couple of years, there would be new laws in place, and everything was going to go very well.
It only took 17 years. No, no, 14 years. 17 years. Yeah.
Yeah. It's a long time.
A long time.
So they've had a number of applications where they've taken it to the European Court of Justice, which happened in 2018. Unfortunately, that didn't go well because they basically said, we'll rule on one thing, and the rest will be still within the GMO rule or rule of law, the 2001/18. I tell you that was because that was the impetus to change. So in 2019, after that European Court of Justice decision, people said, well, hang on, we need a new law. We need to update the law. And why it's really important is that the rest of the world looks to Europe as a bit of a yardstick when it comes to seeds and genetics, particularly parts of the subcontinent and Africa. You know, with GMOs, it's really been a North and South America application.
So a lot of the world has really suffered without having new technology. That's a little bit of the history. The good news is, I think, they've been pushed a little bit by the rest of the world. Canada has done a great job on the regulatory. Other parts of South America, U.S., obviously, Australia, even Japan. Japan, which was one of the most stringent laws around seeds and genetics, approved a GABA tomato, although the critics say it makes you sleep. It's not. It's a very soothing approach to a product in tomato. But that's a gene-edited product that got approved in Japan, which is pretty cool.
Very cool. While gene editing is nothing new in the environment, there's been natural selection and natural mutations occurring for eons. Gene editing as a new science is essentially accelerating what plant breeding accomplishes. What I'd like to do is open it up to the audience to see if there's any questions before we continue our conversation. Lionel?
Peter, congratulations on your shatterproof canola revolutionized harvesting of canola. It was a major, major contribution and allows producers to produce more oil. But are you a gene editing company or are you a GMO company?
We're definitely a gene editing company. The technique we use and the background, we do not do any transgenic steps in the process at all.
Then over to Amit, are you? You're taking the wonderful nutritional functionality in tissue and moving it into the plant. Fantastic. You've done it with iron, doing it with others. Are you going to get feedback or any pushback from the vegan and vegetarian community in terms of having characteristics that are normally occurring in tissue, now having those characteristics retransformed into the plant?
You know, that's unknown, obviously. However, I think there is an opportunity here. So, of course, this is anecdotal. We haven't done a big study. When the news came out, I have a lot of vegetarian friends. I'm not. So I got asked this question, is this vegetarian? And we just talked over a couple of people. It's like, we are producing in the plant. We didn't get the protein directly from the pig. It's a DNA sequence we synthesized. I think everybody was I think there's an opportunity to educate at this point so that it could be acceptable to vegetarians and vegans as well.
If I may ask, sorry, answer your question. I think we need to redefine the word vegan. We need to redefine the word vegan. Because when the word came out, it was not; this kind of technologies were not out there. So now we could replicate nature with science. And the question to a vegan person would be, why are you not getting animal-based products? Why? Because of cruelty-free? Because of you want not to harm the environment? Why? Because of, I don't know, diet consumption? Because in our case, we are getting the same thing without any animal intervenience. So going back to your question, you know, I think it's a new discussion now.
It's really fascinating. Very, very disruptive. Yes, Penney?
Just a quick question. I may have missed this coming in. John Penney, I'm affiliated with Sustain SoCal. Are any of you working on agricultural products that lower effective CO2 emissions? Because you had about 18% global CO2. A third of that 18% is ruminants. So besides building, you know, new types of plants for areas where we have weather change and the like, are people working on sort of the reduction of nitrogen-based fertilizers on plants because that turning into NO2 going up into the atmosphere is a real problem? Seems like you guys got a huge TAM here if you're working on that as well.
So that's a great question. Thank you. We are doing some early work on nitrogen use efficiency. We'd love to expand that effort for sure. I think, you know, one of the things being in agriculture, as long as I have, it's just so frustrating to think that so much fertilizer never gets utilized in the plant. So we always look at both the utilization of actually getting into the plant, but then once it's in the plant, being utilized. And there's two different mechanisms that we have a pretty good understanding now of the genetics of that. And so instead of 60% of your fertilizer running off into waterways, you can actually get it utilized in the plant.
I will say soybean and peas that we work on are natural nitrogen fixers. That is another advantage automatically in our production. Yeah. Thanks for your question.
Rama.
Who gets the seeds? How ubiquitous is it? Can small-scale farmers access it because of price or availability or any other? Is there a hindrance? Obviously, the industrial-sized farmers can access anything they want. So that's one question. The other is, and I think it's Gastón who could answer this. Since there is a vegetarian-vegan movement, how is the meat industry seeing the future?
Let me start with the seed question because I think that's a great question. When you add a trait to seeds, it's for us, like I said, we're a business-to-business. So we deal with seed companies who supply seeds not just to the big farmers, but to every farmer. 60% of the world's seeds are sold by small seed companies. That's globally. 40% are within the big institutions. We see our traits not necessarily creating such a premium that it's unattainable because it's really making that more profitable by using less inputs. So, for example, pod shatter is really taking over the market because farmers have that flexibility at the end of the season. So there's no limitation, if you like, in what we see the products we're bringing to market.
Well, regarding your second question, and then maybe you could go back to the first one. I think that the food producers and the big CPG companies are working on sorry. Hello? Are working on getting alternatives into the market. I think these companies are envisioning a future of multiple segments of consumers. What we are seeing as of now is that the vegetarian and vegan segment is still a niche. We don't know if it will grow or not. But I would like to go back to my previous definition of, well, maybe we could get the same animal-based ingredients and get it into the same products. Doesn't matter. It will come from a plant, a bioreactor, a lab, or an animal if it is the same thing. So I think that these are exciting times for the food industry.
I personally believe that the stars are the scientists now. You know, we used to say in Moolec that food needs nerds. And similar as IT and artificial intelligence and the Microsoft that were quite, you know, was quite a trend in different times. Now the food industry is going to start, you know, learning from these other industries and getting new techs and new technology, new science into food.
So Moolec imagines a day where production agriculture, animal production, is significantly reduced and is instead that type of animal protein is not only included in plants but increased and is a much more efficient way to move that protein, animal protein, around the world. We have time for one more question if anybody has any questions. Yes, please.
Can you hear me? Oh, yes. Okay. Perfect. A big topic of this panel has been feeding more people without increasing the acreage necessary. I do know that soybean farming specifically has contributed to deforestation efforts in the past. I just want to know, like, in the interim, how are you going to increase accessibility and institute these new seeds without first harming deforestation?
I have a short answer to that. 92%-93% of soybeans in the world are transgenics and goes to animal feed. So Moolec is producing a transgenic seed, GMO soybean for food applications. It's just a matter of switching the seed for the same farmers. We do not need to continue deforesting. So the farmers are out there. The croplands are out there. We don't need to increase that. What we need is to start switching the seeds.
Did you follow that response? O kay.
That's correct.
Okay. Because I didn't quite follow it. So I'm glad you did. Okay. Thank you. Peter, do you want to touch on that? That's a great question.
I think it is I mean, it's more applicable to someone who's doing what Moolec is doing. But I love that answer because it really, you know, most of the soybean crop is for, what is it, 92% for animal feed. And, you know, what's interesting is plant-based diets are changing worldwide. So there is a risk that, you know, do we need to have more cropland? And I think there's with technology that's coming today already here that we can make every acre more productive. Now, the other areas are plantations. I think there's areas of ingredients that we use in our day-to-day activities that we could look for other alternatives. Plants are fantastic sustainable products because they use energy very wisely. So, you know, whenever you think about sustainable ingredients, it's really the cost of carbon.
So the cost of carbon to produce a detergent, for example, the cost of carbon in fermentation. Those fermentation products are expensive when it comes to carbon. And so guess what? Plants do very well. They photosynthesize and they produce it from sunlight. So there's, you know, there's pluses and minuses across the industry. But I think with technology coming forward, we are on the right track right now.
Well, I had promised an insightful conversation. Hopefully we delivered. Please help me in thanking the panelists for enlightening us today. Thank you.