Essential tools? Bio-tech touted as key to providing the planet with nutritious foods

30 Oct 2018 --- With current agricultural methods of food production posing the biggest threat to the planet, and 4 billion people suffering from a nutrition gap, forward thinking technologies and processes, such as gene-editing, are key to efficiently growing nutrient-dense foods. Industry experts discussed the opportunities for new biotechnologies and their role in feeding the planet during Future Food-Tech in London. 

If recent innovation in this space are anything to go by, it is not so much a question whether new technologies such as gene-editing will be used, but rather a question of when. Key to achieving this in a beneficial manner will of course be continued industry cooperation and investment in R&D, but also a growing consumer understanding and acceptance.

Chaired by Howard-Yana Shapiro, Chief Agricultural Officer at Mars, the panel sought to discuss how biotechnology can deliver nutritious, transparent and sustainable foods, as well as consumer willingness to accept technologies such as gene-editing.

Tools in the proverbial toolkit
“When we talk about future food technology, I don’t think the scale of some of the problems we face has been articulated enough,” says Shapiro. “There are around 7.4 billion consumers in the world and 1.5 billion producers. However, there are only 300-500 companies that make essentially all the material to feed the planet. When you talk about something being cloistered in a very small number of hands, it is frightening that we don’t have a distributive system.”

An exciting aspect of synthetic biology and gene-editing is their potential to create foods with certain functionalities, and targeted at creating less environmental burden.

As opposed to genetic engineering, which is dominated by a handful of companies, Shapiro puts forward that gene-editing is a “democratized process.” “For those of you who want to do it at home, get yourself a lab and order a kit on Amazon,” he quips. Gene-editing is interesting due to its specificity, he notes, allowing for the targeting of, for example, specific fungicides or other pathogens. This potentially provides workable solutions to a vast number of diseases plaguing agricultural crops. 

“We are now seeing a lot of [food-tech] innovation coming to the stage of commercialization and we will find out how consumers will respond. It will be a different conversation than the one surrounding GMOs because it is consumer facing,” says Brian Loeb, Associate Corporate Investments at Continental Grain.

“What will be interesting is finding out which design functionality matters the most, whether it is something like Perfect Day, making dairy proteins using biotech and producing a very familiar product without the environmental burden, or something like Amai, which is a new product that can offer CPGs new areas of innovation,” says Loeb.

Power of data
Also on the panel, Yanay Ofran, Co-Founder & Chairman, UKKO, US, underscores synthetic biology and the potential role for gene-editing in creating nutritious foods. It could also be used in the creation of foods that are suitable for people with certain health issues such as allergies. Key to accessing this potential is a savvy understanding and use of data and machine learning

“When it comes to innovation in food, people have, until recently, tried to modify the food, so that it becomes better, or modify the patients such that they become immune or can handle the food better,” Ofran notes.

A component that has been overlooked is the power of data, allowing us to learn from patients what needs to be changed in foods such that the foods are better. As such we are now seeing increased options for the use of machine learning and artificial intelligence to learn from patient samples to uncover what it is in foods that create sensitivities, such as peanut allergies.

“The message here is that all the technologies we mentioned are enablers. Data and data science allow us to connect knowledge and map the molecular basis and conditions. With this we can really understand the interface between human and plant. And once we understand it, we can manipulate it from the plant or human side, or decide when to connect a certain person to a certain food, which is in essence personalized nutrition,” he says.

Challenges continue
“A major challenge for us is that we [could] already have the seed of wheat that does not cause celiac disease, but the current supply chain does not know how to deal with it,” explains Ofran.

Another potential challenge is that of consumer acceptance, with consumer perceptions on man-made interventions into nature varying. However, Loeb is positive on this point, saying he is “encouraged by the idea that today there is a much more common understanding of software coding and with that there is an opportunity to reframe genetic engineering and the ‘scariness’ surrounding it, as consumers understand that you can read and write code and that companies can prove it’s a very clean process. It’s going to be hard to argue that [using biotechnologies] isn’t a more efficient way of producing.”

Industry update
In related news that highlights how suppliers are eyeing the role for synthetic biology for the creation of nutritious foods, BASF last week announced it attained a global, non-exclusive licensing agreement with the Broad Institute of Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and Harvard. The partnership relates to the use of CRISPR-Cpf1 genome editing technology to improve products in agricultural and industrial microbiology applications.

BASF reports that CRISPR-Cpf1 has demonstrated distinct advantages for certain applications over CRISPR-Cas9, which BASF has previously licensed from the Broad Institute. By adding CRISPR-Cpf1 to its portfolio, BASF is aiming for the flexibility to choose the right tool for specific applications. Access to both technologies will also help to accelerate the development of new agricultural and industrial microbiology products.

“Genome editing tools represent the next step in molecular biology innovation,” says Peter Eckes, President of BASF Bioscience Research. “The addition of CRISPR-Cpf1 greatly expands our technological capabilities in modern agriculture and industrial solutions and we are eager to see how these technologies will improve multiple products in these areas.”

“This technology represents a transformative application of genome editing for the research community,” says Issi Rozen, Chief Business Officer of the Broad Institute. “CRISPR-Cpf1 can directly benefit advanced research across many industries including human health and agriculture. We are proud to partner with stakeholders throughout the biomedical and agriculture community to help deliver responsible solutions for our planet.”