San Diego’s little Cibus Global is preparing to one day take on Monsanto, the Fortune 500 agri-industry colossus and leading producer of genetically engineered seed. The bioscience company last month formed a joint partnership with an agricultural products company based in Tel Aviv to spur development of new strains of crops. High on Cibus’ to-do list is the development of crops resistant to weed killers sold by its new Israeli partner, Makhteshim-Agan. This is the model pioneered by Monsanto, which developed a line of “Roundup Ready” crops that are genetically altered to resist its herbicide, Roundup.

Cibus, a private venture-backed company with just 34 employees, seems more than a bit outmatched by its would-be rival. Monsanto is a multibillion-dollar company whose Roundup Ready strains account for much of the corn, cotton and soy grown in the U.S. But as Bruce noted in his report, Cibus believes that its technology for producing new crop strains is less likely to raise the ire of activists who oppose the dissemination of genetically modified organisms, or GMOs. Cibus believes its technology—a sort of controlled evolution—will offer a marketing advantage in Europe, where concerns about GMOs have limited the acceptance of modified crops.

Cibus says its technology, dubbed Rapid Trait Development System, or RTDS, uses the natural DNA repair system in plant cells to trigger a genetic change linked to the desired trait. Cibus CEO Keith Walker tells me the company’s technology changes just one letter in a plant’s genetic code. These little mistakes randomly occur all the time in nature, Walker says; yet Cibus says its technology can control the process.

“The traits we introduce in a plant could …Next Page »

Comments (1) | Reprints | Share:        

Agricultural products company Makhteshim-Agan of Tel Aviv, Israel, says it has formed a strategic development alliance and is investing $37 million over the next five years in San Diego-based Cibus Global, a privately held agricultural biotech company founded in 2001.

Under the joint development partnership, Cibus will use its proprietary technology (which offers an alternative approach to inserting foreign genes to create genetically modified crops) to develop new plant traits in five unidentified crops for the European market. As part of the related agreement, Makhteshim-Agan, or MAI, will make its investments based on Cibus’s progress—and gradually acquire a 50.1 percent stake.

Cibus describes its technology, known as Rapid Trait Development System, or RTDS, as a “smart-breeding technology” that introduces desirable genetic traits in a plant by using directed mutagenesis, a process that takes advantage of mechanisms of gene repair. The company says that every time a cell copies its DNA, it makes “scrivener” errors, akin to typographical errors in the genetic code. Such variations are common, and according to Cibus, are part of natural variation. Cibus says its technology uses the DNA repair machinery that corrects such typos, and directs it instead to make changes in a specific way that produces the desired trait in the targeted gene.

Cibus hopes its approach will be acceptable to environmental groups and activists opposed to genetically modified organisms, or GMOs. The European market, in particular, has resisted introduction of genetically modified crops.

Comments (2) | Reprints | Share:        

If you owned a method that can make plants grow bigger and faster on every acre of land, what would you do to best exploit it? Targeted Growth CEO Tom Todaro is hedging his company’s bets 50-50, wagering that his Seattle-based firm will become a player in two potentially huge industries—agriculture and clean energy.

If you can sense that it takes someone with supreme confidence to try to pull something like this off, you have good instincts. Todaro was standing up at his desk, speaking loudly on the phone when I walked into his office. “I was selling a guy 60,000 gallons of oil when you walked in the door,” he told me later.

This was a good sign, because even though Targeted Growth regards itself as a science company at heart, I wanted to ask him about how he plans to best apply the science to fuel the growth of his company, not just plants.

The basic underpinning of Targeted Growth comes from, ironically, basic research from the lab of Jim Roberts at the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center in Seattle (who, small world, happens to be Todaro’s brother-in-law). It turns out that Roberts and other biologists there have learned a lot about genes that play a role in making tumor cells flip into fast-growing, rapidly-dividing mode—and this knowledge actually can be harnessed in a different way if you actually want to accelerate growth, like with plants.

But what plants should you boost, in order to have the biggest impact? As Todaro puts it, “It’s like being able to make your computer operating system run faster. Now all of your applications can run faster.”

This is what leads the company to the half-agriculture, half-energy strategy. Half of the company’s 50 employees, and half of its cash resources, are being put toward food crops, like corn, soybeans, and other grains that end up in your breakfast bowl, as I described in this story back in September. The other side of the company is the part that gets more attention. It’s for crops that can make renewable fuels, namely camelina (a relative of canola) and a version of corn that’s modified to have no kernels, no cob, and just be loaded with simple sugars, like a stalk of Brazilian sugar cane.

Camelina has captured some press attention, because Boeing is pumped up about using renewable fuel derived from camelina seeds as a low-emissions alternative to conventional jet fuel. Camelina was a good choice for a revved up plant, because it can grow on marginal agricultural land, meaning it won’t ever compete for prime land where food crops like corn are grown.

So how does the business model work? There are different models for different markets. On the food crop side, Targeted Growth is licensing its technology to seed companies (think Pioneer Hi-Bred International or Monsanto, although Todaro isn’t naming names). He suggested this is the way to go, because a typical bag of seed corn costs $400, with about $300 of that going to pay biotechnology licenses, and the rest being the cost of the seed, he says. “We don’t make the seed, it’s the technology in the seed,” he says.

Targeted Growth has a major partnership with an unnamed Fortune 100 company, …Next Page »

Comments | Reprints | Share:        

Arzeda, an artificial enzyme developer based in Seattle announced today that it is working with Des Moines, IA-based DuPont to create new crop seeds incorporating Arzeda’s enzymes.  The enzymes will ideally increase the productivity of the plants, providing more food from fewer resources.  The agreement gives DuPont, through its subsidiary Pioneer Hi-Bred, exclusive rights to enzymes developed by Arzeda for the partnership.  Financial details of the deal were not released.

Comments | Reprints | Share:        

Here’s a rare bit of good news from the venture capital world. Boston-based Excel Venture Management has nailed down a $125 million fund to invest in new life sciences companies that it hopes will have broad potential to shake up a variety of industries, including information technology and alternative energy.

Excel has been operating for the past 18 months, but has been tight-lipped about its strategy because it hadn’t yet closed its fundraising. The fund is led by a group of managing directors that formerly worked together for years at CB Health Ventures—including Rick Blume, Enrico Petrillo, and Steve Gullans, as well as Juan Enriquez, the founding director of Harvard Business School’s Life Sciences Project. I got an up-close look at what the firm is trying to accomplish from Enriquez.

The fund’s strategy is to look for ideas that have their roots in life sciences, but have broad potential as “platforms” that can be applied in other industries like IT, energy, agriculture, textiles, and chemistry, Enriquez says. This is becoming possible as biology is becoming more of a digital science, he says. The opportunities in life sciences are already starting to make an increasing impact on the financial statements of industrial giants like General Electric (a big maker of medical devices), DuPont (owner of Pioneer Hi-Bred International seeds), and even classic tech companies like Microsoft, IBM, and Google, which are betting big on digitizing healthcare and life sciences.

“About one-fourth of GE’s earnings come from healthcare and life sciences companies, which is getting larger, while the share of financial services is getting smaller,” Enriquez says. “At DuPont, the single largest driver of earnings is Pioneer seeds. For a lot of companies in a lot of industries, life sciences is the place they are looking for future growth.”

So that’s the lofty vision, but how is this supposed to work out financially? Plenty has been written about how the life sciences venture model is broken, partly because new drug development typically takes a decade or more, costs hundreds of millions of dollars, and has about a one-in-10 success rate in clinical trials. Excel’s answer to that? It will strictly invest in companies …Next Page »

Comments (2) | Reprints | Share:        

Mumbai-Delhi, Tuesday, December 23—I boarded the overnight train to Delhi at Bombay Central Terminal (the mixed use of old and new city names for Bombay is a metaphor for old and new India—the old structures retain the original Bombay, and everything new is named Mumbai). I had forgotten to print out my e-ticket and was prepared to battle/sweet talk my way onto the train. My last train ride in India was over 20 years ago, and I have a lasting memory of patiently standing in a queue that never moved to purchase a ticket, as people kept muscling their way to the front of the line. Getting on the train required sharp elbows and more than likely the conductor had sold your seat to the highest bidder. The contrast this time was stark. I had to pay Rs.50 ($1) to get a ticket printed out on the train. The familiar red-clad coolies/porters were still around, but there was no need for their help; the boarding of the train was orderly, seats were assigned, and the conductor was Amtrak-like amiable.

The train departed Mumbai on time, the orderlies prepared my bed in the four-bed compartment with spartan but crisply laundered sheets, and I promptly went to sleep. A couple of hours later I was joined in my compartment by two gentlemen who had boarded at an unknown station. I was on the Rajdhani express, a series of overnight trains between the metropolitan cities in India. My ticket had cost about $65, a flight would have been $110. I wanted to experience train travel and get a sense of the geography of India’s industrial corridor running between Mumbai and Delhi, encompassing the modern states of Maharashtra, Gujarat, the central state of Madhya Pradesh (MP), the tourist state of Rajasthan, and the largest and one of the poorest states in India, Uttar Pradesh (UP). I was traveling on the most expensive ticket on the Rajdhani; the least expensive was about $1.50.

I woke up at the crack of dawn when the porter entered the compartment to offer tea. I watched the sun rise over a misty, flat landscape. Everywhere I have been in India the sky is hazy. I cannot ascertain if it is industrial pollution, winter mist, or smoke from wood fires, or perhaps a mix of all three. Even here in the countryside the sky is hazy. It is as if the entire country is an incense-filled temple. The passing landscape is a dusty brown and is dotted with patches of green marking small farms, stunted trees, and an occasional herd of cows. Every 30 minutes or so we pass through a small town with a train station. Garbage is strewn everywhere on the tracks, and occasionally there is a garbage dump alongside the tracks at the edge of a town, with foraging pigs and cows.

One of my companions is a Sikh gentleman (see photo) whose cell phone jingles a bhangra ringtone every few minutes. He appears to be a little under the weather and sleeps in between calls and occasional visits from people on the train: “Papa-ji kaisay ho!” (How are you, pops?). Just passed a larger town called Ratlam. We must be in MP, since this where my wife used to get off to go to Indore, the capital of MP, and onto the hill station of Mau to visit her aunt.

The landscape is greener now, dotted with yellow fields of mustard, irrigation-fed no doubt as the last rainfall was likely during monsoons in July/August. The train passes over largely dry riverbeds. Power lines and telecom towers are everywhere. Motorcycles and trucks wait at level crossings. Kachrod station passes by in a flash of yellow walls and red bougainvillea. A field of cotton with a dozen men and women hand picking. A southbound flatbed freight train passes by, our train slows down with jerky braking, dwarf palms dot the sides of the tracks. I recall Yasheng Huang of MIT mentioning that India is a tropical country while China is a temperate country and life is more difficult in tropical climates. Two days before Christmas I am sitting in an air-conditioned train looking out at laborers working in what appears to be hot sun. In the bathroom I poke my hand out the open window and the air feels cool. We fly by Nagda, a larger town in MP. I have a conversation with a porter in the hallway. Apparently this is a special Rajdhani that runs during holiday periods. He says that it is not as luxurious as the daily Rajdhani from Mumbai to Delhi.

I don a long-sleeved t-shirt as the AC is slightly chilly. I have managed to avoid …Next Page »

Comments | Reprints | Share:        

Chandigarh, Sunday, December 7—I drove straight north from Delhi to Chandigarh about 300 km, on a much improved four-lane highway. Chandigarh is a planned city that was designed by the French architect Le Corbusier in the late 1950s. It remains a delightfully livable city that the rest of India has failed to emulate. I am attending the wedding of my cousin’s daughter, a recent dental school graduate, to a young engineer who works with Tata. The local TiE chapter has also invited me to speak to their members tomorrow.

I have met several entrepreneurs who have returned from the U.S. to take care of aging parents and then set up businesses here. Chandigarh is considered to be a tier 2 city (tier 1 being Delhi, Mumbai, Bangalore, Kolkata, and Chennai), in the same league as Pune and Ahmedabad. In reality those cities are far more industrial, including technology-related industry, than Chandigarh. There is a nascent life sciences industry forming, especially around agricultural products: Chandigarh is the capital of Punjab, India’s bread basket. However, most of the entrepreneurs I met had small outsourced information technology businesses with customers primarily from the U.S..

There is an excellent engineering college in Chandigarh, and I had the chance to meet with the director of the college, Manoj Datta. He is busy setting up new degreed programs to respond to industry needs. For example, he was evaluating a graduate program in biomedical instrumentation in conjunction with a local biological institute. We had a vigorous debate about the viability of that degree, along with the head of Philips Labs from Delhi. Philips Labs are creating new products for emerging markets by launching them first in India; they support all Philips divisions, including the medical division in Andover, MA. For instance, they recently launched a UV water purifier that is more effective than charcoal filters. Tainted water is a big problem in India, as many tourists have found. The public water supply is invariably contaminated and almost everybody has a water purifier at home. Boston University has a world-renowned public health department that has projects in India; I need to connect them to Philips Labs and Punjab Engineering College.

I had an interesting conversation with the CEO of the Usha Group, which has been making ceiling fans and air conditioners for many years. He showed me a cell phone that they have launched in tier 3 and 4 cities in India. The cell phone is manufactured by an ODM (Original Design Manufacturer) in China to their specifications and distributed via thousands of cell phone retail distributors. Usha has been struggling to differentiate itself on grounds other than price. To illustrate how powerful this can be, the CEO told the story of an upstart competitor that had inferior products but had stumbled onto a need in the rural marketplace for phones that had long battery life. Electricity is not readily available in most India villages and is unreliable when it is.

I asked him if he had considered differentiating on the cell phone user interface, perhaps by using the Google Android operating system and then customizing the UI for rural India consumers. I will discuss this further with him when I return to Delhi.

Comments (2) | Reprints | Share:        

Eden Bioscience, the agricultural biotechnology company that developed a crop-boosting product called Messenger, said today it has decided to shut down for good and liquidate its assets. The Woodinville, WA-based company (NASDAQ: EDEN) sold its proprietary harpin protein technology in February 2007 to Pittsburgh-based Plant Health Care. Since then, Eden has tried to sustain itself by selling to homeowners and gardeners. It was unable to find another company to buy what was left. The company had just one full-time employee as of March, and two part-time employees, according to its annual report.

Comments | Reprints | Share:        

Targeted Growth has a business strategy that leads straight to your morning bowl of cereal. The Seattle-based biotech company is taking its technology to the market with a high-yield seed crop that can be turned into biodiesel, but it sees a bigger future in boosting production of what it calls “small grain cereals,” the type that end up in those pricey boxes marketed by Kellogg’s and General Mills.

This struck me as surprising when I heard it during an interview with Targeted Growth president David McElroy and Don Panter, the senior vice president for crop development. I met them after they spoke on a panel yesterday at the Biotechnology Industry Organization’s Pacific Rim Summit on Industrial Biotechnology and Bioenergy in Vancouver, B.C.

“We’re a seed company, and we plan to sell to growers,” Panter says. “Ultimately it ends up in your Rice Krispies.”

In his presentation on the panel, Panter didn’t cover any of that. He focused instead on developing more efficient raw material for biofuels, known as “feedstock” in industry lingo. Targeted Growth’s technology, Panter explained, modifies a couple of plant genes known as REV and KRP, which has been shown in field trials to boost yields of camelina by more than 20 percent. The company is now working to commercialize modified camelina, a member of the mustard family. It’s a high-yield source of raw material for biodiesel refiners, and can be grown on marginal agricultural lands in the Northwest and Canada with existing farm equipment. That product is actually going through a joint venture called Sustainable Oils, which Targeted Growth has established with Houston-based Green Earth Fuels.

Apparently, this is all just a beginning. Targeted Growth hit an “inflection point” in the fall of 2007 when it got results in from a real-life field trial (as opposed to a controlled greenhouse environment) that showed it could boost crop yields by more than 20 percent. “A 1 to 5 percent improvement on yield is pretty significant, so this is significant,” Panter says. The company parlayed that result late last year into a partnership in which it licensed rights to use its gene-modification technology to one of the top global seed companies, for “major row crops,” McElroy says.

Targeted Growth can’t say yet who the partner is, the deal terms, or which crops are involved, McElroy says. But the technology has also proven itself capable of raising yields as much as 35 percent in a second seed crop, and the unnamed partner is conducting a field test in a third crop. With multiple opportunities showing up, the company has to decide which ones to license to big players, and which ones to develop further itself.

“We’ve carved out small grains as an opportunity we plan to realize for Targeted Growth and its investors,” Panter says.

The investors are certainly a big piece of this equation. Targeted Growth has raised $32 million in venture capital since May 2006, from investors that include Capricorn Management, AllianceBernstein, and Seattle-based investors Integra Ventures and WRF Capital. The company is currently trying to raise much more. It wants to use the cash to double in size, from 50 employees to about 100 in two years, McElroy says. The plan is to add more expertise in product development, build out new facilities to make seeds and package them, run more field trials, and add two new R&D facilities in Seattle and Tennessee.

Targeted Growth, founded in 1998, got started to build on work at the University of Washington and Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center, where scientists (including Xconomist Jim Roberts) studied the REV and KRP genes. If you delete them in mice, the mice grow bigger, McElroy says. The same principles are at work in plants, he says, and can be broadly applied to most any crop where the seed is the product, he says.

McElroy knows a bit about how to deal with the big seed companies, too, being a veteran of DeKalb Genetics and Pioneer Hi-Bred International, a pair of big-name agribusiness companies in the Midwest. Panter joined the company after a six-year run as chief technology officer of Emergent Genetics, a Boulder, CO-company that was acquired by Monsanto in 2005.

I got the sense that a few of the companies at the BIO event have had the air let out of their bubbles recently, with quite a few half-hearted references to “hockey stick” projections on future revenues. These guys sounded more confident, yet then again, they didn’t promise that the financing was coming imminently. “We’re not a one-trick company,” Panter says. “We’ve got several shots on goal.”

Comments | Reprints | Share:        

The future of robotics lies in… arranging potted plants? Surprising, but it just might be true. Tonight at the MIT Enterprise Forum of Cambridge, a small company called Q Robotics, based in Groton, MA, gave its first public presentation on the technology it has been developing for the past year and a half. Founded by iRobot veterans Joe Jones and Paul Sandin, co-inventors of the Roomba vacuuming robot, Q Robotics’ project has been shrouded in secrecy. Now the veil has been lifted, and what’s underneath is more interesting than it might seem at first glance.

I caught up with Jones, the CTO and 24-year robotics veteran, by phone earlier today. The story of Q Robotics began the day before Thanksgiving in 2006, when Jones and Sandin left iRobot to start a new robot company. “We wanted to invent something, but we didn’t know what,” says Jones. “We wanted to build more practical robots that people could afford, that served actual needs, and that we could build in the near-term… Floor-cleaning robots are wonderful and make a good business, but what do you do next?”

In February 2007, they got an idea at a trade show in Boston called New England Grows, for people who grow ornamental plants—which are bought by everyone from landscapers and homeowners to dentists’ offices. It turns out there are several thousand growers of potted plants scattered around the country, and they grow the plants by the millions on vast fields. Moreover there’s a widespread problem in the industry, and it has to do with the spacing between pots. As the plants mature, the pots need to be moved around and adjusted to keep plants from growing into one another. Growers spend tens of millions of dollars a year on manual labor, just to monitor the pots’ positions and space them correctly in the fields.

Enter Q Robotics. Jones and Co. are building a team of small robots to roll around in fields, pick up potted plants, and space them appropriately. Each robot is roughly cylindrical, 20 inches in diameter and 15 to 18 inches tall, with two big wheels. The latest model (see photo) has a forklift-like mechanism with which to pick up pots. Each unassuming bot also has infrared range sensors to detect positions of objects and an optical sensor to tell whether it has properly grabbed a pot.

“It’s not glamourous, but there is a clear market need for this,” says Jones. And there are plenty of follow-on opportunities in agriculture that would use similar technology, he says, such as soil monitoring, sorting, and loading and unloading goods.

And the broader significance to robotics? “We wanted to make robots that were one technology step harder than what we did before,” says Jones. “Earlier robots like Roomba functioned by rolling around and not getting stuck. These are different, they actually manipulate the environment.” To Jones’s knowledge, that kind of manipulation—performed out in the “unstructured” real world and not on a factory or warehouse floor, as in the case of Woburn, MA-based Kiva Systems—has not been done successfully before. In other words, it might be one small step for a Roomba, but one giant leap for robotics.

Jones says his four-person company (plus consultants) was originally bootstrapped and is in the process of getting outside funding now. It might be a couple of years before the company is ready to deliver robots to commercial customers, however. “We’ve hammered down the biggest technological risks. There are no show stoppers,” he says. What remains is to make the robots more reliable, durable, and waterproof so they’ll work in the rain, heat, and other outdoor conditions.

At the MIT Enterprise Forum tonight, CEO Charles Grinnell showed video of a prototype robot in action. He also unveiled the new name for the company, which is in the process of being incorporated: Harvest Automation. Maybe it’s just me, but I prefer the intrigue of “Q Robotics.” Though I see that harvest automation could be a way to produce a bumper crop of new robot applications.

Comments | Reprints | Share:        

News arriving in my inbox from Cambridge, MA-based Sirtris Pharmaceuticals (NASDAQ: SIRT) this morning caused a double-take: the company known for researching drugs that may treat diabetes and cancer by mimicking the effects of calorie restriction is licensing a portion of its technology to Bayer CropScience AG, the German agricultural biotech giant. For a moment, I wondered how the heck a startup focused on improving human health and lifespan could have any insights into plants.

Then I remembered the red wine connection. Sirtris’s drug pipeline is stocked with a number of different molecules that boost cells’ production of lifespan-extending “sirtuin” proteins (hence the company’s name), and the granddady of these molecules—called resveratrol—was originally isolated from plants, most famously from the grapes used to make red wine. Researchers learned early on that resveratrol is found in greater concentrations in plants that are under stress from fungal infections, suggesting that it’s one of the molecules that provoke cellular defenses such as slowed aging and delayed cell death in plants. It was only recently that researchers began to observe such effects in mammals. So in a way, agricultural applications of sirtuin science actually represent a return to the field’s roots. So to speak.

Which leads back to Sirtris’s announcement. The company said it’s granting Bayer CropScience the exclusive, worldwide rights to agricultural applications of “a certain Sirtris technology that contributes to cellular life span extension and stress resistance.” Bayer intends to pursue the technology as one possible way of increasing crop yields and stress resistance in crops such as canola, cotton, rice, and corn.

“The object of Bayer CropScience’s global research activities is to develop a new generation of stress-tolerant, high-yielding varieties,” says Utz Klages, a Bayer CropScience spokesperson whom I reached in Monheim, Germany. “These crops have to be protected against a wide variety of abiotic and biotic stress factors. As Sirtris is also working in this field, it makes the agreement very attractive for Bayer CropScience.”

But exactly what technologies Sirtris is licensing to Bayer remains a little vague. Sirtris’s U.S. and international patents are very broad, covering the general idea of sirtuin enhancement in human, animal, and plant cells as well as a range of potential applications for same. So you might think that the “certain Sirtris technology” referred to in the announcement is a gene or chemical aimed at boosting sirtuin production in crop plants.

That’s what I thought, anyway. But interestingly, John Lacey, Sirtris’s associate director of corporate communications, says the Bayer agreement is not a license for the company to develop methods that would directly modulate the plant equivalents of sirtuin-encoding genes. “It’s a license that involves the fluctuation of the pathway in plants that influences sirtuin members, but it’s not a license to specific sirtuins,” Lacey says. In theory, Sirtris is still free to license agricultural applications of direct sirtuin modulation to another company. But “those discussion haven’t taken place,” says Lacey.

I tried to pin down Klages on which aspect of Sirtris’s technology seems most promising to crop scientists, but he wouldn’t take the bait. He did say, however, that Sirtris’s technology is just one of many approaches Bayer is testing to the challenge of making crops more adaptable to changing climate conditions. “This is the beginning of a medium-term research agreement that might lead to possible new varieties as early as 2015; it’s too early to confirm the details at the moment,” Klages says. “Let’s see how it works and which technology will be the best to get these varieties.”

Sirtris said in the announcement that it will receive “an initial up-front and future success bound milestone payments” in return for the license. Neither company would discuss the amounts or dates of these payments.

Comments (11) | Reprints | Share: