Corteva entered into a joint development agreement with Norwegian-based biotech start-up Resurrect Bio to further the crop protection giant’s goal of developing disease-resistant corn hybrids by using AI and gene editing technologies.
As part of the partnership, Corteva will use Resurrect Bio’s platform to restore the efficacy of foundational genes that have been overcome by evolving pathogens, Wendy Srnic, VP of biotechnology for Corteva, told AgTechNavigator at the World Agri-Tech Innovation Summit in San Francisco.
Corteva’s corporate venture, Corteva Catalyst, invested in Resurrect Bio’s Series A round, alongside firms like AgFunder, Calculus Capital, Pymwymic, and others, as AgTechNavigator previously reported. Resurrect Bio’s AI-based platform, FloraFold, predicts plant-pathogen protein interactions at a molecular level.
“The diseases will win, but the plants come with new ways to defend themselves against diseases. And so, throughout evolution, this has happened, and so these genes are still present in the genome, but they have been overcome. There is resistant variants of the pathogens that it no longer provides resistant,” Srnic elaborated.
This partnership comes as North American corn growers are losing about “1.28 billion bushels of corn lost to disease alone,” Srnic explained. Farmers are never quite sure what disease might impact them in a given year, but gene editing can create hybrids that respond to multiple disease threats at once, she added.
“In our Genlytix ecosystem, one of the first targets that we are going after to bring value to farmers is in disease control. So, our first-generation product is actually taking multiple genes that are still functional in the genome of corn and relocating them to a new zip code,” Srnic elaborated.
This follows Corteva making a similar partnership with AI and biotech start-up Profluent to develop proteins to bolster its Genlytix research platform, as AgTechNavigator previously reported.
AI for quick, precise gene-editing
Over the years, gene editing has gained traction as a technology to find traits, with AI unlocking further opportunities, Srnic explained. Corteva is leveraging AI to improve gene editing, allowing the crop protection company to weed out bad hypotheses, speeding up the research and development cycle, Srnic explained.
“What we have actually been able to do in a lot of cases internally with AI is broaden that ecosystem of hypotheses ... and then use AI to pull information from many different sources to say ‘These are bad hypotheses, and let’s not even go there. These are the better ones’,” Srnic said
She added, “We have done this in several projects where we needed to make very specific changes in proteins to get certain functions. In the past, that would have been a very long ... process, and we have been able to get to the magic formula in less than a year [with AI]”
