Hello everyone, thank you so much for being with us. I have Peter Beetham here, the Interim CEO of Cibus.
Thank you so much. I've got to thank the crowd here because it's the end of two busy days of speed dating, and everyone's exhausted. I really appreciate you turning up to hear about Cibus. As she mentioned, I'm Peter Beetham, I'm the Interim CEO of Cibus. We are, as the tagline says, unlocking the power of nature. There are some forward-looking statements, and you've all read this many times, I'm sure. I'd like to run through some introduction slides, talk about what we're really focused on at Cibus. We are listed on the NASDAQ as CBUS. I'd like to introduce you first to the dream team, as I call it at Cibus. We've been together for many, many years. Myself and Greg Gocal on the left-hand side of this management team slide, co-founders of Cibus. We're based in San Diego. We've been here since the early 2000s.
We're both career plant biologists, have been building a gene editing company for agriculture for many years. As Greg says, we're building it from the ground up. We've been very fortunate to enjoy San Diego life for many years. We've also been able to attract some great talent in San Diego, particularly plant biologists. Noel Sauer is in charge of our tech development and has been a guiding light for gene editing in agriculture, developing really cool technologies around that space. Carlo Broos is actually based in Europe. He's our CFO. He's been with many companies, including Syngenta. He has a great depth of knowledge in the seed business globally. Finally, Jason Stokes, our Chief Administration Officer, but also General Counsel, has worked with a number of public companies, and we're great to have him. He's the newbie on the team.
The rest of us have been here together nearly 15 years or greater. Who is Cibus? We are a leading gene editing agricultural trait company focused on productivity traits aimed at making every acre more productive. I've spent my career in ag tech. You can tell from my accent I'm not from here, but originally from Australia, where I worked in overseas aid in South Pacific and Southeast Asia. One of the things I learned very early on in my career was that a lot of really great technology doesn't get to the farm gate. One of the driving forces for me personally, but also for that dream team I just mentioned, was really delivering productivity traits, making every acre more productive. We're at a time in the world right now where we do need to be able to feed the world. The planet's changing.
There's a lot of climate change happening around the world, and it impacts agriculture. Now, having said that, we've been working in gene editing for a long time, and it's very exciting. It's an amazing technology, but we've had to really stay focused. We are kids in a candy store. We'd love to be able to do every crop and lots of different traits. On the left-hand side of this slide, we're really focused on core platforms, which are canola, rice, and soybean. When I say a platform, it's the ability to make edits in a genome of these crops from seed and take it back to a whole plant and deliver it to a customer. As I mentioned, we're in productivity traits, so weeds, diseases, and agronomic traits. What I'm talking about here is the ability of a farmer to control their weeds by having herbicide-tolerant crops.
They spray the crop, they kill all the weeds, but not the crop. Same with disease. Being able to have disease-tolerant crops is really important. They can control disease genetically, not necessarily spraying a lot of fungicide. Agronomic, making sure that the agronomy of the plant gives the best yield possible. These are all about saving the farmer dollars at the start of their season by when they plant their seed. The business model at Cibus is licensing traits for royalties. As we sell a bag of seed or our seed customer partners sell a bag of seed, we collect a royalty per acre on an annual basis. You can see when you start to create royalties on every acre in seeds, the numbers get very large very quickly. We've been fortunate. We've got a number of great relationships and collaborations.
On the right-hand side of this slide, it includes some global brands and many seed companies, some that you may not recognize, like Interrock and Federos, but they're rice companies in Latin America that are partnered with us and are looking forward to delivering new herbicide-tolerant rice traits to the marketplace in 2027. We talked about making every acre more productive and getting technology to the farm gate. One of our core missions is really the power of gene editing to seamlessly deliver traits to customers using a time-bound and predictable process. What we are able to do is working with plant breeding companies around the world to deliver these traits within 12 to 15 months. In the past, with GMO, that could take 10 years or more, and that cycle time was just not good enough.
For us to be able to go into their elite genetics, we materially decrease the timelines and increase the depth of their trait development and adapt to readily changing needs. That's a really important part of trait development. The commercialization side of this is all about the time-bound and predictable part of this. Getting elite market-ready germplasm, which is the seeds, in the hands of the seed companies as soon as possible is what we're all about. Often people ask, when's gene editing happening? It's happening now. It's happening around the world. We're in the industry that is allowing productivity traits to get to market faster, so farmers can alleviate some of their constraints on production. As I mentioned, on the left-hand side of this slide, we've got productivity traits, herbicide tolerance, crops that provide farmers with efficient solutions to control weeds.
The best way to show that is on the left-hand side of the slide, where you see unedited rice. When you spray the herbicide that we've got the tolerance to, you kill the weeds and the crop. When you edit it, you kill the weeds, but not the crop. Often people think you spray more chemistry. That's actually not the fact. What happens is you have a more efficient system, so farmers don't need to spray as much herbicide, and you replace that with biology. You replace that with great genetics. As I mentioned, we're moving those to launch in 2027 in Latin America. On the right-hand side of this slide, we talk about sustainable ingredients. It seems a bit of a segue away from seeds, but really this is in the same business model. We're able to produce a natural form of fragrance using a yeast platform.
Again, we use the understanding of gene editing and the understanding of what the feedstocks are for fermentation, and we're producing some bio-based fermentation biofragrance products as soon as 2026. We've done some nominal revenue already in 2025. The other side of this is gene-edited oils that we talk about with gene-edited crops. This is really thinking about how you can use crops that are currently available, like broad-acre crops like soybean, to produce really interesting oils. That's a sustainable ingredients side of our business. One of the things everyone says, how does this happen? How does it work? This slide talks about the steps that are involved in what we call our rapid trait development system. Like many people in the world right today, we use in our discovery platforms computational biology. That's bolstered by using artificial intelligence. This is understanding what to edit.
When you have a genome that is 3 billion bases, how do you focus in and find what you're actually going to edit? We can make spelling changes, like the little red squiggly line under your misspelled word in Microsoft Word. You right-click it and bingo, you spell it correctly. The same sort of concept is what's happening in a genome, rewriting some of the code in the genetic backbone of seeds and crops. Our ability to go back to a single cell and do that through cell culture and then get back to a whole plant is what we do in 12-1 5 months. To give you an understanding of the size of this market, this gives you what we're focused on right now as the rice trait royalty targets. This is the weed management system. We have two herbicide-tolerant traits.
We're going to have single traits as well as combined traits. We can stack them together. On the right-hand side, you see here clearly that you get an annual trait net to Cibus in this $30 to $50 range. When you think about the size of the market in rice, even at 5 million acres, which is relatively small, we can see a greater than $200 million annual royalty to the company. As you expand out into global markets, these numbers just get huge. When you think about rice as the second biggest crop in the world, 412 million acres around the world, we're not going to access all of that, but 10% of that would be pretty amazing. We've just signed a deal with a group called AgVia in India, and India is 120 million acres of that 412.
Already, our Chief Science Officer spent a week in India last week, and that's moving very quickly. We're excited to bring that on stream as well. That's the current near-term revenue that I've been talking about and the business model around traits. I want to do a little bit more of an expansion of this in the next few minutes on the overview of the business. As I've mentioned, there's productivity traits. Cibus is all about the front end of the crop planting, being able to reduce fertilizer, reduce insecticides, the herbicides with weed management, fungicides, and better plant characteristics. These are all traits or all trait categories that create value. The farmer understands that when he or she plants a crop, that one of their biggest input costs is listed in these areas of traits.
Being able to reduce the need for those creates a lot of value and also creates a wonderful productivity for every acre. A lot of you are thinking, is gene editing the same as GMO? No, it's not. I'm going to say that again. Gene editing is not the same as GMO. GMO are transgenics. They take a gene from another organism and put it into a crop plant. It's old technology that was great in the 1990s, but we're in 2025 now. Gene editing has a much faster time to market. It's got a favorable regulatory framework ahead of us, but it also is scalable. We can think about adding all those different productivity traits and stacking them together in crops. It really is the future of breeding. I mentioned before our core mission that we're seamlessly interacting with plant breeding programs.
This is how we do it, by having a faster time to market. The trait machine, this is a recapitulation of what I just mentioned about how we do it. The idea of actually automating this process to take elite germplasm, edit it, test, and then license it within 12- 15 months is a game changer when it comes to plant breeding. In the past, that would take 10- 15 years, and in some cases in breeding programs, it's as much as two to three decades. That's what we need right now if we're going to actually help every acre be more productive. Just to say this cartoon, it is a cartoon. This is a lab with many, many people working in cell culture. This is our pipeline of where we are. I want to point out rice, I've gone through at the top here.
Ag is a show me industry. Show me how it works. Show me that you can actually do the edits. Can you see it in the greenhouse when you grow plants in the greenhouse? Can you see it with successful field trials? Here's a little example in the image here showing, again, unedited canola that when you spray herbicide, it kills the canola and the weeds. When it's edited, it kills the weeds, but not canola. You have a list here of the traits and the various success we have on canola, both in edits and greenhouse and field trials. Right now, we're currently working to build more partnerships in canola and soybean. What about the value of this? When you think about rice, as I've mentioned, you have this annual estimated fee or trait fee or royalty per acre.
It depends on what you're replacing, whether you're replacing a lot of herbicide or a lot of fungicide. Here you see with sclerotinia resistance in canola, we see a $10- $15 net to Cibus royalty. The estimated Cibus peak accessible acres is about 30 million acres, so you get an annualized royalty of over $300 million. It takes time to build this, no doubt, but you can see that as an independent trait developer, the royalty markets are potentially huge. If I go back to the GMO business model that Monsanto helped develop, if you think about one of their major traits, which is a herbicide-tolerant soybean that was also in corn and cotton and some other crops, they're still collecting $4 billion of royalty every year. That's just one trait, one crop, or a couple of crops, sorry. They developed that in 1995, to give you an idea.
They'll be still collecting $4 billion in royalty every year. What are some of the barriers and what are the things we have to make sure are OK? Regulatory is the big one. I'm going to go through this in a little bit of detail because it's really important to understand why GMO didn't take off as broadly as they had hoped in the 1990s. One of the reasons was Europe said no to GMO. There were some concerns about unintended consequences, that the science was problematic. More importantly, it was expensive. It was $100 million to get one trait onto the market. It took 10- 15 years. This is a map showing the favorable regulatory framework for gene editing. This is our world now. When I first started in this area 10- 15 years ago, this was all red. There were no policies in place.
There was no one even thinking about gene editing and understanding what you can do. If you stand still long enough now, you've heard gene editing talked about in human therapeutics, in animal breeding now, and also in agriculture. What's really important is what regulatory agencies around the world have discovered and understand now is that the products of gene editing are indistinguishable from what occurs in nature or comes out of a plant breeding program. That's the seamless part. That's why you can seamlessly put it into plant breeding programs so that, again, it's scalable and faster to market. Right now, there's a lot of green on this map, as you can tell. I'm going to focus in on Europe because Europe has 100 million acres, greenfield acres that never had the beneficiaries of GMO traits.
Now they have recognized that the benefits of gene editing will help reduce all those productivity traits I mentioned, reduce fertilizer, reduce the use of fungicides and herbicides. They just passed last year in Parliament, they passed a new law that now is going through the iteration of the final text. That takes what they call a trilog. The Council, Commission, and Parliament are working through the final text of that. We're excited because we're seeing a final text, we believe, by the end of this year. It sounds like it takes a long time. It does in Europe, but that framework opens up a huge market, not just in Europe, but also globally with trade as a really important aspect of this. In summary, what I'd like to do is just go through some of the highlights of where we are at Cibus. You think about this.
We're commercializing crop traits. There's a global commercialization. We're launching herbicide-tolerant traits in Latin America and the U.S. in 2027 and 2028, building that huge opportunity of royalties. We're also looking at bio-based fermentation biofragrance products, as I mentioned, a little nominal in 2025, but then building 2026 to 2027. We see a harmonizing global regulatory, and that's a really key issue. We're building great platforms with our trait machine that's scalable and time-bound. That is that 12- 15 months. The other side of this is with a number of other crop-specific breeding programs, we've got a really great opportunity to build out our pipeline. With that, I'd like to thank you for your attention. Like I said, starting out at the end of a busy couple of days, so I appreciate that and love to take questions. Yeah.
With gene editing, would you say that because it's like plant breeding, you will not get the surprise results such as when you're putting them in chicken or fish or plant or anything like that?
Correct. That's a great question because plants have the ability to do amazing things. When you think about all of us in this room, we're all 99.9% the same genetically. We have different phenotypes, but we're genetically very similar. Plants go from small flowering plants to 300-foot tall trees. We understand some of the differences on that at a genome level. When we make an edit, we know what the outcome is going to be, and we can follow it really closely. It's essentially what happens in every plant breeding program. They select a tall plant because they think it might yield more. That's full of some mutations. This happened naturally, so you don't have that unexpected outcome.
Yeah, along the same lines, thank you for the presentation. From an external perspective, external stakeholders, there is a negative perception historically around GMO. It's clearly missing a lot.
Yeah.
How much work do you have to do to educate your stakeholders?
Such a great question. I've dedicated a big chunk of my life to that role. I've spent a lot of time in Europe talking to regulatory agencies and explaining what we do. I think I do it all around the world. I've gone to a lot of different countries to help them devise policy to understand the process we actually go through and what the outcome is. To your both questions, I think that the key thing is benefits. With a lot of GMO technology, no one ever saw a benefit. No one went to the supermarket to buy a tomato because they thought that they were going to have better brain health or that they were going to live an extra 10- 15 years. The farmers benefited. I think what they're recognizing is that farms are really influenced by climate change in a big way right now.
Having a more productive acre are the benefits that people are seeing, and they want to see that come to market. There's a real, particularly in the industry, and we're spending time now explaining to people why it's just the same as plant breeding. It's something that we've been doing for thousands of years.
Would that mean most likely as the products are produced, you don't have to worry about different labeling?
Different.
Different labeling, right? You have non-GMO, but that huge differentiation.
Yeah, labeling is a great question because I think one of the things about there's two sides to that coin. Sometimes you want to make it so that it's really different and how cool is this. This is gene edited. Like I want to buy this. Having said that, when you're dealing with commodities, labeling can be time-consuming and costly. We don't see labeling as an issue because it's going to come straight through a plant breeding program. Otherwise, you're going to have to end up labeling everything that comes out of plant breeding. Unless there is a huge benefit that's a vertically integrated system, then I say that we most likely won't have labeling.
I know the street like Monsanto are going to sell instead of seeds to farmers, and then you have to pay your own farms to create the seeds, or you're just going to sell seeds to people that produce and collect royalties?
That's a really good question. I'll ask you about whether, like Monsanto, they're sterile seeds. What's interesting about the seed business right now is it's grown a lot since the 1990s. Most farmers know that buying quality seed every year is really valuable because it improves their yield. A lot of seeds now come pre-treated, so they put a seed treatment around it, like a fungicide around the seed. It's more complex than thinking farmers are going to save seed. What they've discovered is most farmers buy seed every year. In some cases, they won't, and there are mechanisms to collect royalties at the end of the season as well as the start of the season. We see our business model going fairly well. I've been told to stop with a stop sign. Thank you. Thank you. Good question.