The Time Is Now for Plant-Based Synthetic Biology Solutions

The global economy is not sustainable. A cursory look at such metrics as carbon pollution, water scarcity, and soil erosion paints a picture that we, as a global community, have reached a critical point. The time for action is now.

Fortunately, the need is well understood. Consider that about a quarter of the world’s 2,000 largest companies have committed to be carbon-neutral by 2030. These companies produce important products for the world’s consumers, from medicines to fabrics to food. Although progress is being made, many companies continue to source finite and unsustainable resources that adversely impact our environment to meet consumer demand. At the same time, consumers are insisting on a change to sustainable sourcing across industries. How are companies to produce innovative new products, sustainably?

One answer lies in the integration of important, and immediately actionable, plant-based synthetic biology solutions.

Synthetic biology speaks to the design and engineering of biological organisms and is built on knowledge gained from the last several decades of genomics research, and the core principle that biology is fundamentally programmable, with cells not acting solely as information stores, but also as processors of information. Synthetic biology can be used to program a cell to make applications that are physical, and plants represent a uniquely qualified platform to be leveraged.

In a world seeking to evolve to more sustainable solutions, plants are uniquely capable of producing many chemistries that cannot be produced through other means, including microbial fermentation. Calyxt estimates that more than 80 percent of all known natural compounds are able to be produced by plants. These known natural compounds comprise over 200,000chemistries today and we believe plants have the potential to access many of the nearly one million estimated chemistries not yet discovered.

Plants are uniquely capable of producing these chemistries and are a better system for generating them compared to single-cell organisms. This is because plants are natural producers of so many compounds and plants do not require the programming that a single-cell organism does to produce the same compound, if it is even possible for a single-cell organism to produce the complex chemistries that plants can produce. As a result, Calyxt can engineer plant-derived compounds and ingredients as differentiated and more sustainable alternatives to many products and materials in use today.

Earlier this year, Calyxt announced the launch of a strategic initiative that focuses our operations on engineering synthetic biology solutions for a diversified base of customers across an expanded group of end markets, including the nutraceutical, cosmeceutical, pharmaceutical, advanced materials, and chemicals industries. Central to our strategy is the integration of our proprietary technology platform, PlantSpring?, and our BioFactory? manufacturing system, which together will enable us to rapidly prototype and produce complex plant-derived compounds without the need for outdoor cropping systems.

PlantSpring, built on Calyxt’s more than a decade of experience in engineering plant metabolism, includes our company’s scientific knowledge, proprietary systems, tools, technologies, and an expanding set of artificial intelligence and machine learning (AI/ML) capabilities. Our platform delivers innovation through an efficient development process, and we believe our company can develop biomolecules in plants for customers at faster speeds than our competitors in the synthetic biology industry. The PlantSpring platform spans from lab-to-market and deploys predictive and analytical tools to drive down production cycle times for our customers, spanning from discovery through development and scale-up and, eventually, commercial production.

Output from PlantSpring integrates with the BioFactory, which enables us to expand production methods for our customers from solely outdoor agriculture systems to include controlled environment, bioreactor-based production systems. The BioFactory is an emerging force in plant-based synthetic biology based on the sustainable nature of the process, the unique combined capabilities of plant metabolism and our PlantSpring technology platform. This is highlighted by the speed at which Calyxt intends to bring these compounds to market using its customer-driven innovation process. We expect the BioFactory to be a strong new technology that exemplifies the innovation necessary to meet a significant unmet and accelerating need for differentiated and sustainable ingredients and inputs.

Importantly, our system is able to unlock the power of plants to produce complex compounds that are currently finite, difficult to source sustainably, and that may not be able to be produced using other production methods. To date, Calyxt has identified more than 15,000 unique chemical signatures that form a baseline library available to us to produce valuable compounds. We also believe the BioFactory has the potential to be one of the most sustainable production processes across industries because of its production methodology. It does not use fermentation, and there are fewer of the sustainability challenges associated with other indoor production systems including lower levels of off-gasses, reduced water demands, and lower energy requirements.

As companies increasingly move to address the ingredients of their products through more sustainable production, an opportunity for our plant-based solutions is created. The solutions we offer are expressly designed to help our customers produce more sustainable products that help them meet their corporate sustainability targets and consumer demands.?Calyxt can provide access to compounds which occur in such minute quantities in nature that scaling production is both unviable and unsustainable. In some cases, the plants in which they occur are so difficult to source that harvesting them would cause significant adverse ecological impact.

While the problem of sustainable sourcing is enormous, so is the opportunity. The Boston Consulting Group recently estimated that, due to sustainability, decarbonization, and carbon-neutral goals, nature-derived products, such as those developed from plants, will affect $30 trillion of the global economy over the next 30 years.

I could not be more excited to be at the helm of Calyxt, where we are helping our customers use plants in innovate ways, offering unique solutions at a time when they are most critically needed – now.