Page 59 - Breeding Edge ebook

The whole sweet horticultural sector – everything from tomatoes to sweet corn to grapes, you name it –
never “really saw any applications of the technology at all,” he added.

“It was just the ‘billion-dollar crops’ like corn and soybeans that provided a big payoff for research and
development,” Graff said.

Changes in technology have dramatically lowered the cost to enter the market, said Brett Morris, a
principal with Technology Acceleration Partners (TechAccel).

“This is especially true in ag-biotech, where a range of once-daunting capital requirements have
plummeted in cost. The cost of genome sequencing has declined from $100 million per genome in
2001 to approximately $1,000 per genome in 2015,” Morris wrote in a blog for GlobalAg
Investing.com.

“Cheap cloud storage now allows companies to host, analyze, and reproduce huge data sets. Computing
power has significantly increased and enabled advances in artificial intelligence and machine learning.
As a result, companies are observing phenotypic characteristics in the lab versus the field, and
continuously improving outcomes by feeding more data to smarter algorithms. And the insights these
start-ups are producing are moving into development faster, thanks to high-throughput automation. In
simple terms, this means it’s easier to start a company today than ever before.”

Still, much of the basic research starts on university campuses and then, through business incubators,

collaborations with other companies and licensing agreements, the research into both agriculture and
human health, spreads like a spiderweb – ultimately connecting in myriad directions and levels of

investment.

Consider the case of Biochemist Jennifer Doudna at the University of
California-Berkeley. She, along with Emmanuelle Charpentier from the
University of Vienna and others, are widely credited with being the first to
propose that CRISPR-Cas9 could be used for programmable gene editing.

In plants, this editing capability can be applied to promote drought
tolerance and disease resistance to protect plant health and increase crop
yields. It also can provide direct consumer benefits like the removal of
food allergens and the improvement of the nutrient composition of foods
and oils.

Researchers discovered they could harness CRISPR (Clustered Regularly Biochemist and Professor
Jennifer Doudna
Interspaced Short Palindromic Repeats) systems to more precisely cut and
edit DNA in plant, animal, and human cells. And it didn’t take long to

realize that this new technology could potentially be a game changer in providing benefits for both

agriculture and human health.

In 2011, Doudna teamed up with researcher Rachel Haurwitz, Martin Jinek, then a postdoctoral

researcher, and James Berger, then a professor at UC-Berkeley, to found Caribou Biosciences. The name
“Caribou” is a combination of Cas, a term meaning CRISPR-associated, and ribo, as in ribonucleic acid,
or RNA. Doudna remains on the firm’s scientific advisory board.

But in addition to working as a professor of molecular and cell biology and chemistry, Doudna and
colleagues at Berkeley and UC-San Francisco (UCSF) launched the Innovative Genomics Institute in

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