Climate change will make it increasingly difficult to grow crops across many parts of the world. Pairwise is leveraging CRISPR gene editing to develop plants that can better withstand adverse conditions.
Pairwise uses cutting-edge gene editing to produce crops that can withstand increasingly harsh climate conditions, helping to feed a growing population even as the world warms.
The seven-year-old startup was cofounded by several gene editing pioneers, including MIT’s Feng Zhang and Harvard’s David Liu, who helped invent and improve the breakthrough CRISPR tool.
Last year, the company delivered the first food to the US market, that was developed with the precise genetic scissors, a less-bitter–tasting mustard green. It’s now working to produce crops with climate-resilient traits, through partnerships with two of the world’s largest plant biotech companies, Bayer and Corteva.
Pairwise says its technology enables the company and its customers to efficiently introduce and fine-tune new plant traits. The toolkit includes a proprietary CRISPR enzyme (the part of the technology that snips off bits of DNA), as well as a base editor, a second-generation CRISPR technology that can alter a single DNA letter. Co-founder Liu first developed it with his research team.
Among its early efforts, the company is developing and field testing shorter, sturdier types of corn, blackberries and other crops that could survive high winds and other extreme weather events amplified by climate change.
The company believes that these dwarf plants can be grown closer together, potentially enabling farmers to produce higher yields with less fertilizer and fewer insecticides. Growing more plants on a given area of land, or shrinking fruit trees closer to bush size, also means it could be more economical to grow their crops in agricultural hoop houses. These temporary, movable greenhouses can be covered with plastic or shade cloth to control growing conditions. That, in turn, could enable more farmers, particularly in poorer parts of the world, to protect their crops from heatwaves and other severe weather.
In addition, Pairwise is working with the Gates Foundation to create new varieties of high-yield yams in Nigeria. It has also licensed its suite of genetic tools to Mars to help the confectionary giant develop cacao plants that would be more resilient to plant diseases and shifting climate conditions. The cacao trees, which farmers predominantly grow in West Africa, are coming under increasing stress from rising temperatures and erratic rainfall patterns.
Key indicators
- Industry: Food and agriculture
- Founded: 2018
- Headquarters: Durham, North Carolina, US
- Notable fact: The company was cofounded by several scientists who were instrumental in inventing and improving CRISPR, including MIT professor Feng Zhang and Harvard professor David Liu, both of whom also have appointments at the Broad Institute.
Potential for impact
As climate change fuels more extreme weather and creates otherwise harsher conditions such as drought, the ability to grow crops with the same or higher yields than are seen today could help sustain farmers and feed communities. Particularly in some of the hottest and poorest parts of the world, climate-adapted crops promise to prevent hunger and starvation.
Caveats
To date, Pairwise hasn’t delivered any climate-adapted foods to the market. So it remains to be seen how big of a difference such plants will make in the fields and on store shelves.
There’s a general, if untested, hope that consumers and regulators will be more accepting of CRISPR-edited crops, which involve editing the plant’s own DNA, than many have been of transgenic crops, which are created by swapping in genes from another species.
Next steps
Pairwise representatives say the company, which has raised $155 million to date, is evaluating short-stature blackberries in field trials now. If those tests go well, it intends to work on squatter fruit trees as well, such as cherry or peach.
On its website, the company says it has successfully demonstrated edits in 14 crops, and completed field trials for at least two more: unspecified varieties of corn and soy.
Pairwise hasn’t announced any specific timelines, but the company says it expects to deliver a variety of “climate-adapted, delicious and consumer-loved crops” in the coming years.
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