A new agtech company focused on enhancing gene editing for plants has launched in St. Louis, the Danforth Technology Company announced Tuesday morning.
The company, Spearhead Bio, is the third startup in three years to spin out from the Donald Danforth Plant Science Center, and aims to complement existing gene editing tools like CRISPR, which burst into the mainstream last decade. Spearhead Bio founder and chief scientific officer Keith Slotkin says CRISPR is like a really precise pair of scissors for gene editing.
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“It’s a great tool,” he says. “But if you think about what you can do with a toolbox that only has a pair of scissors in it, it’s limited. You can make cuts, destroy, and rip apart things in the genome, but there’s not much you can produce just with a pair of scissors.”
Enter Spearhead Bio, centered on decades of Slotkin’s research into transposable elements—pieces of DNA he likens to glue. Slotkin says this breakthrough allows for the modification of a plant genome without needing to introduce foreign DNA to it.
“It rearranges the existing DNA in that crop in a way that could have been done by nature over evolutionary time,” he says. “But we’ve really sped up that process and made it a whole lot more specific and accurate.”
It’s a significant advancement because it could mean plants that are better equipped to deal with challenges such as drought, extreme temperatures, or flooding, but aren’t genetically modified, Slotkin says. This would cut down on the time, and money, needed for these developments, he adds.
“If you don’t introduce those foreign DNA sequences, you don’t have to succumb to this gauntlet of regulation that can often be just as expensive or more expensive than the actual science of creating the product,” he says.
Investors are keen on funding the new company, which has secured commitments from Rovaq Ventures, St. Louis BioGenerator, Hjelle Consulting Group, Alta Grow Consulting and a couple other initial investors. Danforth Technology Corporation CEO and Spearhead Bio current CEO Tom Laurita says this financing round netted more than $1 million in funding and was oversubscribed.
“At least two of the investors came to us,” he says. “Highly savvy ex-Monsanto people who are aware of the technology and wanted to be part of it.”
There likely will be more funding rounds in the future, but Laurita says it didn’t make sense to raise more at this current moment.
Next steps for Spearhead Bio include a handful of engineering challenges to solve imperfections in the technology, Slotkin says, though he didn’t describe what those were.
“And then there’s just scale,” he says. “We just have to do this on a much larger scale than what we’ve previously done in an academic sense.”
The total invested into Slotkin’s new technology is closer to $4 million when considering the grant support he’s garnered from the National Science Foundation and Danforth grants, Laurita explained. Slotkin’s research was one of NSF’s first NobleReach Emerge awards, amounting to several hundred thousand dollars that paid for due diligence and research to potentially bring the technology and intellectual property to the commercial market, he adds.
“Just because it’s a good invention, that’s not enough. There has to be a market fit. There has to be a problem you’re solving,” Laurita says. “We talked to customers, did sort of a customer survey. We brought in outside experts on the technology.”
Slotkin says commercialization of research and discovery is something he’s wanted to explore in his career and was one of the driving reasons why he relocated to the Danforth Center and St. Louis from Ohio State University in 2018. The Danforth Center already had the contacts in place, which spared him having to shop around the idea, he says.
“Coming out of the Danforth Center, I’m not left to my own devices to go identify potential investors,” Slotkin says. “I have no roots in St. Louis. I’m a total outsider but I’m part of this generation of folks coming because of this agtech industry. This is where the action is.”
Laurita says he’s pleased to see a third company in as many years spin out of research from Danforth Center (the others are Metablify and Peptyde Bio, now part of Invaio). Such efforts are why, he says, he was brought on as the Danforth Technology Corporation’s CEO.
Laurita previously co-founded the St. Louis-based biotech company NewLeaf Symbiotics. Inc. in 2012.
“I was pretty skeptical myself when I started, honestly, because typically, tech transfer offices in academic settings are not as successful as they’d like to be,” he says.
But his experience at Danforth has been different, thanks to senior leadership’s commitment to entrepreneurship, Laurita says. Part of the secret sauce, he says, is keeping principal investigators, like Slotkin, on payroll while they pursue an innovation, and helping them connect with potential investors or overcome challenges with intellectual property, conflict of interest, or ownership issues.
“This allows PIs to dream big, they don’t have to quit their job, which is a big deal,” Laurita says. “This has become, from what I can see, really a model. I’ve had people from other organizations, specifically ones that are trying to do this in a university setting or some sort of nonprofit setting asking, ‘How are you guys doing it?’”
