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Inari is growing something potentially very big.
From a base in West Lafayette at the Purdue Research Park, the company’s scientists are racing to create environmentally friendly, food-insecurity-fighting crops through special genetic technology.
Founded in 2016, Inari Agriculture Inc. already has a $1.5 billion market value and also maintains a facility in Ghent, Belgium. It was hatched from Cambridge, Massachusetts-based Flagship Pioneering, the same venture capital firm that launched pharmaceutical and biotechnology giant Moderna, which is still based in Cambridge.
“The genesis for Inari—and it continues to be our focus and mission—is, ‘How can we help build a more sustainable food system?’” said Emily Negrin, Inari’s vice president for corporate affairs.
Inari is using predictive research and gene editing in an effort to reach some key benchmarks: Increase the yield in corn, soybeans and wheat by as much as 20%; decrease the water needed to grow corn 40%; and decrease the nitrogen needed for corn growth 40%.
A report from the U.S. Global Change Research Program estimates that world food production needs to increase 60% to 100% by 2100 to feed “a larger, wealthier and more urban global population.”
Inari is hoping to make quick strides toward that goal by helping to develop seeds for row crops that produce higher yields and require fewer nutrients. What could be done in 10 to 15 years using traditional plant-breeding techniques, Inari can do in four to six years with gene editing, Negrin told IBJ.
Inari competes with agribusinesses such as Switzerland-based Syngenta, Germany-based Bayer (which owns Monsanto) and Indianapolis-based Corteva Agriscience. But unlike most, Inari doesn’t produce seeds—instead, it develops the technology to alter seeds’ DNA, Negrin said.
Disruptive technology
Inari brings a disruptive model to the seed genetics industry, said Mark Denzler, CEO of Rushville-based 1st Choice Seeds, which sells seed to at least 1,000 farms in Indiana and seven Eastern states.
Denzler is a test customer for Inari, offering its customers “proof of concept” seeds developed with Inari technology. He hopes to someday offer a finished product to his clients, but Inari has not set a target date for launching its technology.
“I would say Inari is probably at the leading edge of this innovative opportunity for plant breeding,” Denzler said. “But that is not to say that Bayer, Corteva or other companies in this space are also not attempting to do the same thing.”
Jiaxin Ma, an agronomy professor at Purdue University, said Inari’s approach is unique in that it accelerates the process of selecting traits within plants.
He said it combines data technology and CRISPR, which stands for Clustered Regularly Interspaced Short Palindromic Repeats and is a genetic tool that is made to precisely cut, then modify, delete, replace or correct precise sections of DNA.
Since 2019, Inari has been developing in West Lafayette although it’s still based in Cambridge. It has about 130 employees at the Purdue site, its fastest-growing location.
Claudia Nari, chief product officer, leads operations there. Nari earned her degree in plant breeding from the University of Buenos Aires in Argentina in 1987. She worked for Monsanto and Bayer before joining Inari
two years ago.
“Up to the late ’80s, early ’90s, it was all about conventional breeding,” Nari said. In the ’90s, the industry introduced genetically modified organisms, when foreign genes could be inserted into plants.
“But genetically,” Nari told IBJ, “the insertion of foreign genes only gave you the ability to solve binary problems: If you have the gene or you don’t.”
Complex issues, like climate resilience and sustainability, can’t be solved that way. Gene editing, and specifically multiplex gene editing—when multiple genes can be changed at once—allows Inari to address those problems.
“To me, gene editing is the next frontier of revolutionary innovation,” Nari said.
Denzler has been in the business nearly 30 years. He remembers when conventional breeding was the only option. But last year, he witnessed Inari’s showcase of gene-edited soybeans in Rush County in one of the company’s test plots.
Inari is expanding its Indiana footprint. A 42,000-square-foot greenhouse is under construction and scheduled for completion next year. Inari plans to create 140 jobs via that facility by 2026.
Denzler said it’s notable that Inari chose Indiana for its research and development process.
“That is where the rubber is going to [meet] the road,” Denzler said. He said Inari’s locating here speaks to the strength of agribusiness in Indiana. Farmers in the state will be the first to see the final product due to proximity, he said.
The process in West Lafayette is a constant feedback loop of shifting genes and measuring results.
“Those are complex things to do,” Nari said. “You know, there is no one silver bullet that [is] going to solve those problems.”
Seed editing vs. GMOs
The U.S. Department of Agriculture has taken the position that gene-edited crops are “fundamentally different from GMOs” and thus require less oversight, according to a 2017 report.
With GMOs, or genetically modified organisms, DNA from one plant or animal is inserted into the DNA of a different plant or animal to produce a desired characteristic change in the host. Gene editing has the same goal, but the method is different: Hyper-precise shifts are made in an organism’s own DNA to turn genes on and off or to rearrange existing gene sequences.
Using CRISPR gene editing, Inari does that to seeds, Negrin told IBJ.
Gene editing has been notably less controversial than GMOs when it comes to foods, but gene editing in humans has stirred ethical concerns. In late 2018, a Chinese scientist was sentenced to three years in prison for violating medical regulations when he announced he had created the first genome-edited babies.
Recently, the FDA has OK’d gene-edited livestock.
The first FDA-approved GMO product was biosynthetic human insulin, in 1982, to treat diabetes. Genetically modified foods have been controversial since a GMO-engineered tomato first hit the market in 1994. Concerns include such crops’ impact on the planet’s ecological balance, inadvertent introduction of new allergies, and the concentration of market control in GMO-seed manufacturers.
In 2016, Congress passed a law that created a baseline for bioengineered foods to be labeled, with mandatory compliance beginning in 2022. Certain GMO foods are required to be labeled as “bioengineered,” but there are loopholes for foods that contain only small amounts of bioengineered foods—like oils and corn syrup—according
to Agriculture.com.
The pushback against GMO foods created a market for non-GMO foods, despite the FDA and USDA maintaining that these foods are safe and healthy to consume.
The history of food produced from genome-edited plants—what Inari is creating—is much shorter. The first food product from a gene-edited plant hit the U.S. market in 2019; the soybean variety modified to include increased levels of heart-healthy oleic acid has not been widely adopted by farmers.•
Editor’s note: This story has been updated to correct the first name of 1st Choice Seeds CEO Mark Denzler and Inari’s market value, which is $1.5 billion. The story has also been updated to clarify Inari’s goal of increasing the yield of corn, soybeans and wheat by as much as 20% See all of our corrections and clarifications here.
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