All right. Well, thank you all for coming. We have the honor of Rory Riggs, the CEO of Cibus, come up here and giving you guys a presentation, and then we're gonna do a little bit of a Q&A and invite another co-founder, Peter Beetham, up. And so we'll have Rory come up. He's got a very diverse background, a lot of founding of other pharma companies and involvement in spaces there. But I think he says this is his greatest project yet. So thanks for coming.
Thanks, and Tom's been nice enough to give us this time where I'm gonna. I suddenly realized a lot of people don't even know what a trait business is and how a standalone trait company works, and so the neat thing we thought we could do today is.
Where's the mic? Let me have it.
Don't move your mic on the guy. I apologize. I thought what we'd try to do today is have my presentation, take you through what a trait company is. Maybe you all know, but it'll be helpful for us all to talk about what is the technology that happened that allowed a trait company to happen? And look, today, Peter and I are receiving an award for being one of the 100 best innovations in America this year for our Trait Machine, which allows us to take as companies, elite germplasm, take a single cell from it, edit it, and in 18 months, return it to them with just that change in it. It's a really cool technology that allows us, in as little as 3 years, to do what takes them 16.5 years to do.
That's the kind of technology that allowed us to do it. And then we thought once we did that. We had a great day yesterday with Tom. He turns out he really does an excellent job at asking probing questions. And so we'll just have a little Q&A with Peter and I. Peter's important because he wrote, like, the 1999 paper, one of the first papers on gene editing in agriculture. He's part of the Cornell mafia, so you can hear more from him on what the technology is. Cool. Next slide.
Can you get the remote?
Oh, sorry. He told me he wouldn't do this for me. So we are a trait company. A trait company is somebody who puts a trait into a seed and then collects a royalty as they plant the seed. So we're a royalty company. We have our customers. Our target is all the row crops. We're trying to build these partners, these little technology platforms, where we can take a single cell and regenerate it into a crop, which is a really hard thing to do, but we've done it in canola, we've done it in rice, we've done it in wheat. We're this close in soybean, and then we'll have corn.
Our customers are the biggest seed companies, and we've a pretty good record to date of signing up the major seed companies to be part of our program. But this is the thing most people... The great thing about this audience is it's mostly an ag audience, so you probably know this. But most people don't realize that a seed is just one big genome. And what do seed companies compete on? Seed companies compete on their germplasm or the traits in their germplasm. And a lot of people here probably know who Harry Stine is. He's one of the 100 richest people in America, and he got there by supplying germplasms to seed companies. So he's in every corn seed, I believe, and every soybean seed, and he collects royalties and has forever, and that's a big business.
Traits, if you want to think of what the trait business is, it's Monsanto, right? They built this industry. They probably get $6 billion a year in royalties. I mean, glyphosate and Bt traits are both on over 300 million acres. And so the cool thing is, and most of these traits, if you get it right, you can go across multiple crops. But that's the business here. And it's pretty hard to think of a single technology product these days that doesn't in-license technology. Yeah, how much in-license technology is there in your iPhone? Look at Qualcomm. Any chip that doesn't have it. Look at General Motors, you know, just the car parts manufacturers.
So the idea of having technology that goes into a technology product is a pretty regular basis, and if you're in the seed business, you probably know at the end of the, every September, you go down and figure out who do you owe royalties to, and you check them off, and you send out the royalty checks. That's what we're in. The big difference is we're the first independent trait company, and we are because of this thing we call the Trait Machine. It allows us to do this on our own. Up until now, it's really been an intraseed business by and large. In traits, the big focus is productivity, and what you'll see is the productivity curve was moving well until they banned GMOs.
And then suddenly, the growth in productivity changed, and the whole hope is that with gene editing, see that gap there? The whole hope that gene editing can fill that gap. And that's why country by country, everybody, every regulator is now starting to approve us. We just put a press release out yesterday where Canada announced that they were going to regulate us as conventional breeding. England, who would have thought the E.U. would do it? But the E.U. voted in February to do it, so it's a really big movement around the country. They're all. And the reason they're doing it is because of this and because of climate change.
The diseases you used to have in Alabama are now in Saskatchewan, and so they have a real problem, so they need some solution to that, and we're potentially their solution. The other is these traits, if you get them right, I always joke, you all heard of 23andMe, that we all have 23andMe, so we can figure out... Well, plants aren't that much different. You know, genomes are genomes. So if you figure out where disease happens in one genome, you can figure out the regions in the other. It's not identically parallel, but that's why we our big goal is to get, you know, the Bt traits and the herbicide traits from both in over 300 million acres, and they're both earning over $10 an acre.
And so if you're somebody like us, that's your dream, is to get those crops. And this is a 2008 annual report from Monsanto. This is what they told everybody traits would do to them. Obviously, that's what we think traits will do to us, but the trait world is, their business was built on traits and seeds. But they had to get into the seed business to be in the trait business, where we don't have to. The seed companies, remarkably, have all bought onto this idea, that if we can actually, there was a lot of give and take. They had to, we couldn't do it until we actually had traits, we'd done field trials to prove the traits work, and then they bought onto it.
But now that they have bought onto it, I think it's pretty well acknowledged in the industry that there's room for an independent trait company. Obviously, safety concerns kill the GMO industry, and the big thing for gene editing, and you'll see all the regulators, what they're doing is they're approving. If you can put a trait in a plant that is indistinguishable from what would happen in nature, they'll regulate you as conventional breeding, and it's a really big moment to be able to do that. So when we put a trait in a company's germplasm, in their seed, it took us longer, it delayed us two years to make sure that the seed companies we were giving it to, we could prove to them that the only thing we changed were the actual genes they wanted to change, and nothing else changed.
And the good news is, nowadays, which you couldn't have done 20 years ago, you can see a genome, you can actually see what's going on, so you can actually prove that quality control test. So that's why they're all accepting. With every bag we sell, we'll say, "Powered by Cibus," and it'll mean that we'll have done it, we will have done that test, and also we will have done, as they're bulking up, a field trial to prove that the traits in this seed meet the standards we sold them. Is that pretty cool? And it's not just non-GMO. This is really like Yahoo! Search versus OpenAI. I mean, we can do amazing things. We can do.
Very hard to do a complex trait, like a disease trait with breeding, 'cause it's a bunch of modes of action, but we can do that. Our team, I laugh with Peter, he couldn't have done it two years ago, but now, if you see three genes he can change, he can change them, and it's really neat where we've come in technology. This is what I call the 25-year activist program. We had a guy named George Poste, who sat on our board forever. He took us city by city in Europe to explain what gene editing was, and now, 25 years later, they're all doing what we thought they would do. They're all saying: If you can be like nature, we'll approve you like nature, which is pretty cool. So we're pretty excited about that chart.
So this is the big idea. This is the thing we're winning our award for. We call it the Trait Machine, and the whole idea is we can industrialize breeding. And that the big thing is that we can do it in as little as 3 years. That paper, many of you may have seen it, it just got published, but it keeps getting republished, and the numbers are the same, that it takes for a GMO trait 16.5 years and $115 million, and half of them, 150-- not half, a third, is the regulatory problem of... because Europe treats these GMO products like drugs, and so the tests they have to do to get through, and that's the big savings here. So what is the Trait Machine?
It's a series of semi-automated, proprietary steps, and it's the coolest thing. I love this idea of being able to have, like, a little inventory box, and you come in and say, "Here are all the, here are all the crops we can do, and here are all the traits we can do. You pick a trait, and you tell me what crop you want, just give me your plant," and then we're gonna take that plant, and we're gonna integrate the trait into that plant. And then, there's two big technologies here. One is the actual editing process. That's a huge process, and, you know, it used to be, like, 1.01% conversion, and now we're getting, like, 5%, 10%, sometimes 50% conversion rates, so amazingly successful conversion rates. But for our technology to work, you've got to regenerate that edited plant into a seed.
So this whole growing, I call my factory a maternity ward, but it's basically all these things growing. So we regenerate a new cell, and then we transfer it. And when we transfer it, it means that they're all accepting the idea that the regulators are saying that what I got them happened in nature. And the reason they know it's true, we like to talk about it as Magenta box to Magenta box. "Send us your Magenta box, and we'll return it to you with your trait in it." It's a pretty easy visual for you to see. And why is it needed? There are so many diseases out there. Because of climate change, things are changing.
There's this giant need now, more than before, for traits to address some of those problems, and really, we are the dream, and, and I'm not the dream, but this company is the dream to be able to get this thing out. And so if we fail, we'll set things back for a while. But this is why this is really such an important trait. And, and it's... And these big traits earn $10 an acre. So in these five major crops, in just the major developed worlds, you're talking 500 million acres. So if you can get a crop, a trait that works across acres, it really will, by far, be the biggest thing I ever did. Is that helpful, to, to see what the machine is? And not only with the business opportunity, I will just go to the Q&A.
As opposed to many companies where you're in your 25th year, and you're on your fifth management team, none of my founders have left. Everybody who's come here has stayed here forever. If you know my background at all, I've been a pretty good pioneer in biotech. I ran a company called Royalty Pharma, which is probably not R-- I started a company called Royalty Pharma, which is the largest royalty company in pharmaceuticals, and that's what Cibus is gonna be. Cibus is going to be a royalty company. So when we get to a billion-dollar royalties, we're gonna borrow $4 billion and give it to our shareholders, 'cause that's what this business should be. It should be a business run as a royalty and financed like a royalty. Biomatrix is equally relevant there.
That is a company that was the leader in biological devices, where when I took it over, it was, like, 7, and we sold it at 40. But more importantly, we got the product approved, we built two factories, so we got it launched in 140 countries, and now it's a billion-dollar-plus product. So Peter, who's here, was really a pioneer. He wrote one of the original papers in gene editing, and from Cornell, Greg was a teenager when he came to us, and now he's so much more senior than Peter. I don't know what to say. And Noel came after Greg, and now Noel is senior to Peter, so it's pretty cool. Wade was a doctor, but he was my lead analyst at Biomatrix. I've known him for a long time. So everybody here has known each other forever.
We don't just have technology. The thing to say that our technology in under three years works, is we actually have a pipeline that's done. So for these three developed products, every one of those developed products has not only had a validated trait, it's had at least two years of field trials. After those two years of field trials, the customers have sent us their germplasm. They, no big guy was gonna send us their germplasm until they'd gone out in the field and seen it. Yeah, so for canola, is the pod shatter.
I always talk at the limousines, went out in the field, and you took out the limousine, and you started banging the canola against the car, and the pods didn't break, and they said, "It's okay, we'll take it." But that's the nature. Then, they've all sent us their germplasm, and we've all edited it, and we returned over 10 customers, 7 of them back to them. So that's how far along we've come, and that wouldn't have gotten here with good technology. Sclerotinia and HT, they have big milestones. Disease traits are really complicated. Like for AIDS, it wasn't until you had 3 different modes of action that you were able to stop AIDS, and the same things are of AIDS, and of AIDS, sorry, diseases in plants. You have different modes of action.
You know, one that stops the pathology from getting in, one that stops it from spreading across, and one that stops it from sitting in the tissue, and you need to stop both of those to have a durable trait. And so we've done two of those, third one this summer. You'll see hopefully in the next couple of months that we've successfully made the edit for the third mode of action, and we'll have greenhouse data later this year on, and on HT2. They need new herbicides. Glyphosate's been around for a long time. Weeds don't always die as they used to die, and so, they need a new trait. A lot of people, this is a, a new herbicide, probably not a new herbicide, but a new herbicide for a trait, and it's a really valuable product.
I think this could be the first $100 million, 100 million acre gene-edited trait, just 'cause of the need in the industry for a new herbicide. And that also will have editing data this year and greenhouse data this year. And going with Sclerotinia would be our ability to get a soybean platform, that would change the world, we believe. This is what the industry's gonna be. The industry is gonna be a series of partnerships. What I say is, our job is to be an extension of a company's seed program. Not like Monsanto way back then, we're not in competition. Our job is to have them be comfortable that we can work with their germplasm. They all have ideas of things they want to do. Our job is to be able to take their germplasm and put in new ideas.
They've been working on this forever, they've never had the technology to be able to do it. That's what Bayer said themselves when they signed a deal with us, is they said: "If you really can do this..." And they don't sign these deals until we've actually done it once for them, so they see how fast it works. They all would like to be able to say, "Could you work with me on this trait?" And then that's why you get not only our traits, but customer-specific traits, and the customer-specific traits will also be royalty-bearing. So it'll be a series of royalty-bearing traits. And this is one you don't think about, but there's so many, the big category called sustainable ingredients, and they're using based on environmentally challenged things like palm kernel oil and palm oils.
And so the idea is, or Procter & Gamble is funding us because 1 million of their products use ingredients that are environmentally unsound, and so they're paying us to develop this trait family of traits. Even fragrances aren't natural, and so they're, we're gonna have a whole set. This is, this could be as big as any one of those crops, and P&G is funding most of it. And our big driver, there's a lot of drivers, but we're this close to soybean. And if we can get this platform for soybean, and we can take a single cell and grow it into a plant, and then put all these traits on it, if we can get Sclerotinia in soybean, there's nobody in the industry who won't want that trait.
That's a trait that would, we believe, will be well over $10 an acre. And it won't be on every acre, it'll be on the acres where you have white mold problems. And so with that, I cut this down to have a Q&A. Was that a good summary of at least what our industry was and how we look at it? And then you can ask questions. Cool? Thanks, team.
I'd like to invite Peter Beetham.
You sure have your big.
Co-founder.
Go.
President of Cibus up here.
Right.
But wanted to make this open as well.
Yeah.
So if there's any questions, feel free. We're friendly here.
Yeah.
Feel free to yell them out, or we'll get you a microphone as you get inspired.
We're friendly and excited.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Yeah, definitely. So I guess just to start it off, I mean, you're seeing a lot about kind of gene editing and that applied to agriculture and seed companies. So would just love to kinda hear just the understanding of the key benefits of gene editing versus the existing GMO technology, which seems to be kinda the most dominant thing out there for seeds.
Yeah, I always say, as a technologist, it really was the Holy Grail, to be able to think about how you can go in and edit a genome. I think Rory said it, you know, a seed is essentially a genome. So as we've learned, a lot about genomes of all crops now, being able to understand the, the structure and function and say: Okay, if I wanted to add a new trait, like, white mold tolerance, which is Sclerotinia, what do I need to go in, and which genes do I need to edit to give that trait? The challenge in the past has been, it's been a random walk.
So either, you know, if conventional breeding is that what you do is you go into a field and select something that has some tolerance, but then to maintain that in a breeding population and get it into the right genetics to actually commercialize, it can take 30 years. Hopefully, it takes less than that, if you're lucky, but it's a bit of a random walk. So being able to edit in the genome in that seed and say: I know I wanna target these specific genes in this specific place is really very cool. And being able to do that, then you have a trait that becomes robust and durable. And then, you know, as Rory just mentioned, the Trait Machine is amazing because it allows us to scale and accelerate that whole process.
Mm-hmm. Yeah. So, oh, sorry, go.
I can add in.
I guess another follow-up question, too. It seems timely, too, with... It just seems like GMO seeds are out of favor, and just kind of curious in your perspective on that, whether it's warranted, if it's just customer consumer preference, or if there's something more, more deeper there with safety issues.
Well, there's a number of buckets in that question, actually.
Um.
Let me start with the technology part. I always think of the GMO technology as like Windows 95. It was a really good operating system in 1995. And it's done some amazing things, so, but it was limited. It was limited in two ways. It was limited by what you could actually do by taking a transgene, a gene from another organism, and put it into a plant. It wasn't precise, and so it was went into a genome in lots of different places. And so we always thought at that stage, in the late 1990s, that this was going to be the answer to everything, and it wasn't. So there was a technology limitation, for sure. The other part is the acceptance. And so the acceptance with GM has not been global at all, as everyone knows.
Even to today, people are anti-GMO. From a scientist standpoint, I, is, is one of the safest things that ever happened. The problem is that, it was really shut down, by a lot of the regulatory agencies around the world. But I'll just reiterate what I said at the start, is that was 1995 technology. We're in 2024. We have gene editing now that works with plant breeders and seed companies, and allows them to start thinking about all these amazing traits that are going to- that Roy just mentioned, that are going to help change the world, combat climate, everything like that.
Yeah. And, and that's a great, oh! Over there.
My question really is about your customers. My question really is about your customers. Now, you, you list five, I think, or six, P&G, Bayer, Nuseed. Are you an order taker at this point? Are they coming to you? You know, I know there's a development process. Are you actually engaged in further discussions with other seed companies at this time, you know, using the partnership agreement that you signed with 2023? Is it kind of a process where, you know, you, you're describing it as Magenta box to Magenta box. Is the partnership agreement Magenta box to Magenta box, too?
Yep.
And are people coming to you?
First of all, I dream of the day when I'm an order taker. So we're not an order taker yet. We're in some places, I think we're almost like it. And an example of where we are almost like it is, rice never had a herbicide trait. 95% of all soybeans has a herbicide trait, 90% of all corn has a herbicide trait, 95% of canola has a herbicide trait, and so what you're seeing in rice is exactly that. It's hard to say it's an order taker because my sales guys are killing themselves to get it in, killing themselves to prove the technology. But we now have 40% in North America and Latin America of the rice acreage of customers with it, and it'll grow a lot this year.
A big thing that'll happen this year is that they're all signing up, and they're all sending us their germplasm. And so that type of situation, when we get Sclerotinia in soybean, we will be an order taker. That's zero question. When we get Sclerotinia in canola, we'll be an order taker. They all desperately need this. This is the biggest killer of their crops. And what's really cool about this, to some degree, is that you guys, you guys are in ag. There's nobody in the seed business who's not trying to do what we're doing, but they just don't have the technology for it.
So when you go into them and goes, "Here's how far I am on this topic, and we can do better than you." And that, that's a really big moment when we realize that they, they've only gotten this far, and we're going to be doing it. So is that a close enough thing to an order taker? Is it really?
Oh, I have another question. Yes.
Yeah. One thing I'd just say quickly on GMO, the other thing for GMO versus this, which is really critical, nobody in ag thinks GMO is a problem, so we have to all start with that. There's just nobody thinks GMO is a problem. But the reason it's a problem is because the regulators, and so it takes so long to get them. So for the big seed companies, one of the things that's exciting about our technology, that's why EU is so important. They know that if we put a trait into it, they can have free export responsibility. That's just a huge moment for them, to know that they can ship it to... They can know when it comes off the field, they can ship it to Europe without just five years of testing it.
And the other is this idea of going from Yahoo! Search to OpenAI. That's what gene editing is. It's really OpenAI for agriculture. And that's the big change here that we're going to be able to do. You know, we all know there's, like, six really big categories, from cyst nematode to rust, that we all want fixed, and so there's a race to get these done. And God knows that we're determined to be the people who win that race, but we think we have the technology to do it. But that's what we should all be thinking about, is what are these giant challenges that we want fixed? So.
That's a great segue to the next question. Just seeing a lot of positive announcements about regulatory action in different countries around the world. So just curious what that all means, and it seems like even countries less favorable to GMO, that there's potential opportunity there, but.
Take it.
You got it. I think it's a great question. It seems like it's happening in the last couple of years. It's actually been the discussions and education around gene editing with a lot of the regulatory agencies has been going on since the early 2000s. What a lot of the regulatory agencies around the world have recognized is that it's a product-based regulatory. In other words, what does the final product look like? Does it look like it's come from a conventional breeding program? Is it indistinguishable from what occurs in nature? If it is, then they know how to regulate that.
So that part of the education was that, you know, a lot of us traveled to different parts of the world to talk to various regulatory agencies around the world, to give them a level of comfort of what the technology was and what the outcomes were, and how the products were going to hit the market. So this has been a long process, but we're excited because, you know, what a lot of the agencies have recognized is that if they can harmonize the regulatory around the world, then the technology will move quickly into the marketplace or more quickly, and allow seed companies to provide products for farmers that will improve productivity. So, you know, there's a big push in Europe right now on the Green Deal to have the Farm to Fork, a part of that Green Deal, is aimed at reducing crop protection products like herbicide by 50%.
And without technology, that's a pipe dream. And so one of the, I think a lot of the opponents of GMO have recognized new technology actually can help answer and address some of these really important questions. We like to think that our biology, in other words, our seed, edited seeds, can replace a lot of chemistry. And so that essentially saves farmers a lot of dollars because they can reduce their inputs. So when you put it in that context, the regulatory agencies get very excited. And so a lot of the policies have been put in place now, which is great.
Mm-hmm. Yeah, that's great. And I guess just to level set, what's the state of kinda regulation in the U.S.? I'd love to.
So.
understand that a little better.
So the U.S. was very early on, they had an Am I Regulated. And so they recognized that the technology was moving quickly. I mean, we've been doing field tests and literally thousands of field tests for at least 5-6 years. And so one of the things that we went through with the USDA and APHIS is Am I Regulated? It then became the SECURE rule. And so the U.S. has really done a nice job, actually, of streamlining the process for material that comes through technology, where you have an edited seed, so that they can address it very quickly and very efficiently.
Mm-hmm. And yeah, if you type online, "Am I Regulated?" You can see the list, and we have, like, 18 products approved, and nobody else has, like, more than 3. So pretty exciting, interesting list of where the industry is.
Yeah, got it. There's also, I guess, a number of different kind of gene editing companies using that technology. Just curious, how, how are you guys different from, say, like a, you know, an Inari or a Pairwise?
So I'll go on the technology side, and I'll let Rory talk about the business. You know, the biggest announcement and a well-known announcement was with CRISPR. But as Rory said, I've been working in gene editing since 1999, so it's not that new, it's just we have a whole series of new tools. I like the fact that Noel Sauer, who's head of our tech development group, talks about the GRON, which is our gene repair oligonucleotide, this small snippet of DNA that actually guides the edit as the star of the show.
And so when you think about, you know, when you're editing a genome, the idea of making a cut is like a CRISPR or a TALE or other nucleases, there's literally a whole myriad of them. But when that comes back together, DNA doesn't repair itself very accurately sometimes, and so that's when you get a gene knockout, for example. With us, that differentiates Cibus, is we use this gene repair oligonucleotide, this GRON. It's a little bit like the red squiggly line in Microsoft Word. When you make a spelling mistake, you right-click it, and bingo, you spell it correctly. So that's the template for editing exactly what we want in that genome. So we can do gene knockouts as well, by rewriting that, some of that code. We can also regulate the sequence, we can create a new function.
So it's, it gives us a lot of flexibility. So that's why Noel always talks about it being the star of the show, and I like that. So that's what differentiates us, that part of the editing, the precision.
I always have a completely different answer.
I know. That's why I handed it to you.
I think we all have to get used to the idea that in biotech, there are neurology companies and cardiovascular companies, and they're using the same technology, but they're in different businesses, and the same thing is true in biotech. You know, both these other companies you mentioned have amazing heritage and amazing people within them. But, Pairwise is going after products. We've, from day one, made a decision that what Monsanto did was right. Look at what farmers' problems are, and if you can solve them and quantify the economics, you know what you're going to be paid for. You know, rice. Rice in Latin America, rice is a perfect example. We believe we're going to save farmers at least $100 an acre. And for that, Monsanto set the rules.
If you can save me this much money, I'll give the trait guy a third, the seed guy a third, and the farmer a third. So we're pretty comfortable we'll get over $20 an acre for our trait in rice because of the amount we're saving for them. So everything we do has a quantifiable benefit that you can back into it and go, "If they can do this..." And it's not like years of field trials. You find out pretty quickly what the results are. You know what I mean? And each of these others, you know, and Ari is a brilliant company, but I think they're doing more like a Harry Stine, as I said there. They're more thinking about what is germplasm? How do you get... And it's a great business, it's just not the business we're in.
There are different tests you have to do it, and you get to evaluate. And ours, hopefully, you can say each of our five traits, and its easiest one is Sclerotinia. When you're you can lose 90% of your crop to a disease, so that's a pretty big thing, and that's what we've got to focus on, and that's how we'd like to be differentiated, and that's what we think is different between the trait business and everything else, and the difference between Monsanto.
Got it. Super helpful understanding there's a difference between the germplasm and the traits. Just you guys have a lot of great partnerships with the leading kind of big incumbents. Would love to just get your guys' perspective on how, what the state of R&D for traits and germplasm is at the big companies, and then how you guys are kind of partnering with them, and how that process works.
That's all you.
Okay. What's interesting about our ability to develop a trait in elite germplasm is it has taken us quite a few years to get to that point. The reason I mention that is because I always think of the ag industry, particularly in seeds and traits, as a show me industry. Show me it works. Show me you can put it, you know, if you've got it in the greenhouse, that's great, I want to see it in the field. I'd love, you know, it's great in the field, I'd love to see it in the farmer's field. That's what we've been able to do, you know, particularly with canola and rice, over multiple years.
A lot of the incumbents have recognized that, and they see us more as an extension of their plant breeding program. So they become a customer as opposed to a competitor. You know, they have some great ideas, and they are now getting into gene editing as well. So it'll be. I always see this as a complementary relationship with the incumbents in this space. The thing that they all have is the ability, you know, of the channel to market. And that's one of the hardest things in agriculture: once you have something, getting it through a plant breeding program, getting it registered, building inventory, managing that inventory, getting it to the farmer's gate. And so for us, we can work with them.
They'll have some of their own gene-edited traits, I believe, in the future. They are, you know. But that'll be additive, just like in stacked traits they have now in GMO. So when you think about Corteva yesterday talking about PowerCore, it has a whole lot of series of stacked traits. We can add a gene-edited trait to that.
Mm-hmm.
And vice versa, too. So, you know, there's the ability to sort of work hand in hand with a lot of these incumbents.
Got it.
I'd say the big thing they all have is amazing breeding operations. If any of you guys are in the seed business, I'm still astounded at the math and statistics arrangements around these breeding operations. But that's not us. Our job is to say: Can we help make you more efficient? That's what the analog to digital is. They have problems, and they're all working on these problems. How can they solve these problems? And if we can solve them from 10 years earlier, 10 years quicker, and get into the field, this is a huge, huge moment. So we really just think of ourselves with all these partners as: Can we be an extension of your operation, and can we help deal with the problems? And we weren't going to get there until they actually gave us our germplasm and shows that we can do it.
We have this great dream that that is the future of this industry. The future of this industry is these partnerships that we work with people in the long term.
Got it. Great. Also saw the press release, material news, warrants an 8-K about the wheat regeneration. Would love to hear a little bit more about that and what kind of the potential for that product.
So I'll start off. I think that, I'm smiling because-
You should be
... single cell, single cell culture is not easy.
Can I take one step? Do you guys understand what that is? It's a really cool, it is the core of what we do. So if it'd be helpful, he can give a little more background on why we are able to take your elite germplasm, put it in, edit it, and give it back to you. It's really an amazing, and it's all yours. I don't want you to talk about it, but go ahead.
So, you know, we've all heard about stem cells, and how important stem cells were, on the human therapeutic side. It's the same. Essentially, a single cell in plants has the ability to go from a single cell back to a whole plant. And that's, you know, that cloning process allows you to sort of think, "Okay, so within a single cell, can I make one edit? Can I make two edits? Can I make a thousand edits?" If you can, you know, that is totally possible. It's chemistry, it allows you to sort of think through the new genome and what you want to go in and essentially edit in that genome. Once that editing is complete in a single cell, getting it back to a whole plant is difficult.
Doing it in the best genetics for seed companies was almost seen as impossible. And so we're excited because not only can we do it in certain genetics, we can do it in a lot of different genetics. So when you think about the Trait Machine, that's why when we were announced wheat, we got so excited because no one had actually done that.
Ever done it?
With regards to, particularly with the genetics that wheat has, 'cause it's a very complex genome to get back to a whole plant. So that is a foundation of what we do. And, you know, we've done it in multiple crops now. You know, it's funny, a lot of people would say, "Well, you couldn't do it in flax, and you couldn't do it in rice, and couldn't do it in wheat." And we're continually leveraging the knowledge that our team has done an amazing job of developing, and we're just leveraging it into each new crop as we go. So wheat was a big win for us.
Mm. In addition to 60 million acres in Europe, pretty good market for it.
Yeah.
and so it's, you know, just one of the big crops. With soybean, if you can do it, is this huge thing that suddenly be able to take anybody's plant and be able to put these things in. Go ahead. Next.
That's great. I guess also, too, just really quick, regardless of the state of development, if you had to choose kind of one trait and one crop, where do you kind of see the most potential in terms of adoption and the seed companies, putting it into their seeds?
I think we both have the same answer. We can say it together. Soybeans and Sclerotinia.
Sclerotinia.
If you can do these two things, I think the world changes. I think the world realizes there's a real value to gene. I think we can certainly solve some of these big problems. This is well, he can do a Sclerotinia, is a complex disease. And it's not just making the trait like herbicide. There's a fancy word that comes in there called durable. Something that lasts year after year, and then that's the cool thing about three modes of action. Once you get them all together, you have a curve, be able to use that word, durable. Is that fair?
Yep, perfect.
Got it. Soybeans. So, I guess a follow-up question for some of these seed companies that do soybean, how do they kinda think about this in terms of their product portfolio? Do you think that this, that the, you know, they'll kind of apply to everything, or are they thinking about having more premium products with your traits in it versus and then charging a premium for those?
So I think with Sclerotinia, it's going to be widely adopted. The soybean has you know, if I just focus on North America for a minute, they have a whole lot of maturity groups from sort of basically the border with Canada all the way down to the South. It's, there's incredible genetics now in soybean, and so, they'll, they'll be very keen to get it into d- specific maturity groups quickly.
Mm-hmm.
And then target areas that have a bigger white mold problem than certain other areas. It'll be additive to the traits they already have, like herbicide tolerance. And then certain areas of South America, we're really happy. We've got a great partnership with GDM, who in South America is one of the, or is the biggest germplasm supplier in soybean. There's a 145 million acre market down there, and they, you know, they have 40% of it, so it's enormous. And so that trait will be on top of it. I'm just gonna go back a little bit on the disease, too, because I think what's important about... You asked about the traits. When you think about disease tolerance, it is one of those traits that you, from a gene editing standpoint, can go across multiple crops.
So, you know, diseases, we're focused on Sclerotinia, but that learning allows us to think about Fusarium, Phytophthora, rust, all the other diseases that are associated. And to my mind, I'm so excited by that as well, is that not only is soybean Sclerotinia, but when you think about wheat, yesterday is, you know, there's more fungicide sprayed on wheat than any other crop.
You left out the big thing. We're gonna solve Sclerotinia in canola first. It is the biggest killer in canola.
Yes.
So we have a field trial and a greenhouse trial in this fall. It'll be in canola, which is really cool.
Perfect.
I think that's the time we have, so thank you, guys, so much.
Thank you.
Very educational and exciting.
Oh, thank you. This was awesome.
Excited for the future.
Oh, we have a lot of work. Let's get back to work.