Speaker 1: This is Bloomberg Business Week with Carol Messer and Tim
Speaker 1: Steneveek on Bloomberg Radio.
Speaker 2: Well, the European Commission, the EUS regulator, proposed yesterday a
Speaker 2: set of laws that tackle gene edited plants, food and
Speaker 2: textile waste, soil health and seeds. They will complement an
Speaker 2: earlier package to green sectors from transport to energy and
Speaker 2: trade in a bid to put Europe on track to
Speaker 2: meet its new twenty to thirty goal of reducing emissions
Speaker 2: by at least fifty five percent from nineteen ninety levels.
Speaker 2: The proposal aims to ease regulations for crops made with
Speaker 2: so called new genomic techniques ngts. So we're going to
Speaker 2: get into this a little bit of an explainer for
Speaker 2: you all. Rory Riggs is CEO the publicly held small
Speaker 2: cap company Sibis, which develops in linessiness plant trades to
Speaker 2: seed companies. He joins us here in our Bloomberg Interactive
Speaker 2: Broker studio at the stock by the way, is at
Speaker 2: one hundred and ten percent so far here in twenty
Speaker 2: twenty three, and there was a merger.
Speaker 3: So a lot of things happening for you guys. Welcome, welcome,
Speaker 3: nice to have you here.
Speaker 4: Thanks for vetting me.
Speaker 3: So tell us a little about your company. Dig a
Speaker 3: little bit deeper.
Speaker 2: I gave it a quick little explainer, but tell us
Speaker 2: what you guys are exactly doing.
Speaker 4: What we're doing. We are the leaders in the post
Speaker 4: GMO world. And the post GMO world is called gene editing,
Speaker 4: and gene editing.
Speaker 3: Because GMO was genetically modified.
Speaker 4: Yes and okay, so go ahead, but genically modified it
Speaker 4: to if they take foreign DNA or transgenes and put
Speaker 4: them into plants, and because of it, they get things
Speaker 4: called traits. BT is the most famous one. It's an
Speaker 4: engineered protein that makes the plant poisonous insects, and when
Speaker 4: insects eat it, they die. And so this trait got
Speaker 4: rid of a lot of INSTANCEX that i'd use the
Speaker 4: great productivity, but you still had a plant that had
Speaker 4: this engineered protein stuck in it. What the gene editing
Speaker 4: guys do is they hijack nature's own way, and so
Speaker 4: they just only make changes that could naturally occur on
Speaker 4: their own. And that's why it's been It's a big
Speaker 4: advance in the technology. You see it in human stuff.
Speaker 4: It's an industrial field. And so the idea that if
Speaker 4: you could take plants and they have their own natural
Speaker 4: repair mechanism. If you could take that repair mechanism and
Speaker 4: make the repair. That said, if you have these genes
Speaker 4: that this other plant has, maybe you won't get skeleitinia.
Speaker 4: You won't need fungicide for it, or you won't need
Speaker 4: it'll give you different traits.
Speaker 2: These traits are so basically, are you weeding out the
Speaker 2: bad stuff?
Speaker 4: No, I think because that's.
Speaker 3: Genetically modified to some extent.
Speaker 4: Right, Yeah, nothing, we'd do. We will we will never
Speaker 4: have a product that couldn't have occurred in nature. Okay,
Speaker 4: that's the most important thing what we would do. So
Speaker 4: for our first trade for disease for squeritinia, there's Atinia
Speaker 4: is a white mold. It happens in like the oil
Speaker 4: seed plants, and it causes major yield losses and cost
Speaker 4: of fortune to fungicides to manage. And so the idea is,
Speaker 4: if we there's some plants that don't get this disease, right,
Speaker 4: so if you.
Speaker 2: Could figure out that naturally occur in nature, yes, so
Speaker 2: you're going to replicate that.
Speaker 4: They're going to replicate that exactly right, That's exactly what
Speaker 4: we're doing. And so Suddenly these plans won't need fund
Speaker 4: you side, and these plants won't have this disease. And
Speaker 4: that's the nature of what we're trying to do. And
Speaker 4: there's so many big diseases where this works. And these
Speaker 4: diseases from rust to serium, these are diseases. They're killing crops,
Speaker 4: and these are diseases. And now there's a hope that
Speaker 4: you could make changes in real time. You know, the
Speaker 4: whole there's two things going on. It's one this technology
Speaker 4: to make changes as though they were natural, and two
Speaker 4: to be the ability to do it in the fraction
Speaker 4: of the time and cost of normal breeding. And we
Speaker 4: talk about is agriculture has never had their technology moment.
Speaker 4: They're analog to digital moment. Just look at breeding and
Speaker 4: you realize this is analog and so they take sixteen
Speaker 4: point five years and we take less than five. That's
Speaker 4: the nature in the real time you could do things.
Speaker 4: You know, even bear yesterday when they said the whole
Speaker 4: porpoise of this new technology is it takes us sixteen
Speaker 4: and a half years, and with this technology, we could
Speaker 4: do it less than five.
Speaker 3: How new is it.
Speaker 4: It's taken us twenty years to get here?
Speaker 3: Why was it so difficult.
Speaker 4: It was difficult not so much to make changes, but
Speaker 4: do it in a way that you know, we were
Speaker 4: building the first trait factory and so that's we're going
Speaker 4: to have biopharmaceutical standards. We expect I think called isostandards
Speaker 4: around it to build those things. Just like in biotech.
Speaker 4: This takes a long time to get the standards correct
Speaker 4: and to be able to master the technology in a
Speaker 4: way that you would say, this isn't magic. This is
Speaker 4: really a scientifically proven way of adapting changes. And all
Speaker 4: the regulators are focused totally on this word. Is it
Speaker 4: a scientific method that is trackable and manasubles you know
Speaker 4: every step of the process what's going on, and that
Speaker 4: just doesn't happen overnight.
Speaker 1: Are regulators starting to get more onboard with GMOs in
Speaker 1: general that can be productive.
Speaker 4: So the regulators. What's happening is the regulators. The Britze
Speaker 4: is a big favor. A couple of years ago they
Speaker 4: wrote a big paper on our technology and explain that
Speaker 4: the traits from our technology you're into signatule from nature
Speaker 4: and they send it out to everybody and since then
Speaker 4: every country's sort of taken two paths. One there's a
Speaker 4: GMO path which could take forever to get proved and
Speaker 4: treated like a drug, and another path for gene editing,
Speaker 4: and if you qualify for this path, you will be
Speaker 4: regulated as conventional breeding.
Speaker 1: So you're viewed as gene editing non GMOs and that
Speaker 1: is more helpful in terms of regulation and getting past
Speaker 1: some of the red tape of that regulation and totally definable.
Speaker 4: And so they all have this rules that says if
Speaker 4: you're here like us has it was called you know
Speaker 4: am I Regulator and Secure Act, they have rules and
Speaker 4: if you can prove you fit in these rules so
Speaker 4: you are like nature, they're going to say go. And
Speaker 4: that's what Europe when you read through their things, that's
Speaker 4: what they're saying.
Speaker 2: Also, can every plant be gene edited? Yes, because you've
Speaker 2: done it.
Speaker 3: Already or no.
Speaker 4: No, our focus as you would hope. There's five big
Speaker 4: crops that are like five hundred million acres and that's
Speaker 4: what you want me to be focused on. You want
Speaker 4: you can't grow these crops in vertical farms. You need
Speaker 4: something like us to be able to make changes so
Speaker 4: that they can fight nature themselves.
Speaker 3: So what are the crops that you guys do?
Speaker 4: Then we started with canola and rice, and for us
Speaker 4: our technology to work, we need to be able to
Speaker 4: take a single cell and grow it into a plant
Speaker 4: that allows us to then edit that cell. Somebody sends
Speaker 4: us their plant, we can take a single sell and
Speaker 4: grow and that's called a fancy word called a protoplast model.
Speaker 4: But the ideas we've done it in two crops, and
Speaker 4: we're really close to soybean. So one by one we're
Speaker 4: going to do this model in canola, rice and soybean,
Speaker 4: and then follow it with wheat and corn. Those are
Speaker 4: your big grains.
Speaker 1: Wheat would be huge for I mean, they're obviously all huge,
Speaker 1: but I just can't help but think about the impact
Speaker 1: that you know, the Russian invasion of Ukraine has had
Speaker 1: in terms of wheat production and access to food globally.
Speaker 3: It's been cataclysmic, and they all have.
Speaker 4: One disease, like in wheat rust. If you can solve rust, god,
Speaker 4: you change the whole farmer's mode. And that's the promise
Speaker 4: our techn energy can do.
Speaker 2: So Rory, who are your biggest customers, the seed companies,
Speaker 2: all of them, that's the idea. You're Monsanto's, You're like
Speaker 2: all of them.
Speaker 4: Yeah, So our Our vision of breeding is something we
Speaker 4: call a high throughput gene editing system that works as
Speaker 4: a service industry to the seed companies, right, and so
Speaker 4: we can do it and just as they're getting ready
Speaker 4: to launch, they send us their elite germ plasm and
Speaker 4: we can which which was just the the germ plasm
Speaker 4: they're ready to launch, they can ship us. We can
Speaker 4: then take that germ plasm, edit it and grow back
Speaker 4: their plant with everything that had plus our edits, and
Speaker 4: give it back to them. And we can do that
Speaker 4: in years.
Speaker 3: So the edits are the things that.
Speaker 4: You that we do.
Speaker 3: But it's years.
Speaker 4: Yeah, well it's years because you have to grow these plants.
Speaker 4: You can't fight nature.
Speaker 3: How long take go through the process, right, Yes, so that.
Speaker 4: If you do it, if you edit a seed, it
Speaker 4: could take a year for that seed to be a plant, right,
Speaker 4: you can't short circuit that. But soon after that and
Speaker 4: then we have the same type of quality assurance things
Speaker 4: you would hope to make sure you're safe. So we're
Speaker 4: the we're curating a new industry. So it's so desperate
Speaker 4: that we do it correctly. Yeah, it makes sense, and
Speaker 4: so that's why it does.
Speaker 2: It's really it's really interesting. The process all done in
Speaker 2: a lab. I'm assuming right, it's all.
Speaker 4: Done in the lab, and we're really excited. Soon we're
Speaker 4: gonna announce we call it a trade machine. We have
Speaker 4: something called our TDS, which just a rapid trade development system,
Speaker 4: which is the first end to end system. If you
Speaker 4: did it here, we can track a series of step
Speaker 4: wise change just to hear, so you can manage it.
Speaker 4: And we're going to make a we called a traite machine,
Speaker 4: a factory that's going to be able to do this.
Speaker 3: I want to get right back to Rory Riggs.
Speaker 2: He's chief executive officer of Sibis, as we said, publicly
Speaker 2: held small cap company. He is still with Maddie and
Speaker 2: me in our Bloomberg Interactive Broker studio.
Speaker 3: And I keep saying that.
Speaker 2: The stock is up a ton, but as you say,
Speaker 2: you guys merged with Klyx, right, and so that certainly
Speaker 2: impacts in terms of what the share price, and that
Speaker 2: I think happened in June. Yes, yeah, so do my
Speaker 2: favorite tell us in our audience a little bit about
Speaker 2: your background.
Speaker 4: So I went to Middlebury College and Columba University, and
Speaker 4: I was I came to an investment bank in New York,
Speaker 4: there was a leader in biotech, and so we were
Speaker 4: all there when Gentecho in public and am Genuine public
Speaker 4: and a lot of us all went off to be
Speaker 4: entrepreneurs in biotech. And so I've started a bunch of
Speaker 4: companies in biotech. Company called sud Gen was just the
Speaker 4: first kindness inhibitor company. And I ran a company called Biomatrix,
Speaker 4: which was the first company that took hyaluronic acid and
Speaker 4: replaced your synolvia fluid. And I started a company called
Speaker 4: Royal gy Farm, which.
Speaker 3: Many carolantic acid is like the stuff that's all in
Speaker 3: people's skin.
Speaker 1: I was like, I know what that.
Speaker 4: Is, right, it is that's laws invented this field, right, Yeah.
Speaker 2: But it's really well when you think about genetics more broadly,
Speaker 2: whether it's in plants or whether it's in medicine, I
Speaker 2: mean holds the answers to a lot.
Speaker 4: Who holds all the answers, especially for seeds, because seeds
Speaker 4: are basically just germplasms and traits. There's not organs in there.
Speaker 4: So the whole characteristics of a seed is based one profile, right, right,
Speaker 4: And so that's that's what you're playing with it. That's
Speaker 4: why It's so much like a movie, right change.
Speaker 1: And in terms of the movie aspect of it, just
Speaker 1: to get like, really worst case scenario here, if we
Speaker 1: end up totally bad news climate change, can this completely
Speaker 1: replace our food sources? Someday it's not going to.
Speaker 4: Place the feod sources, but suddenly, you know, we can
Speaker 4: totally make crops that are more efficient in the use
Speaker 4: of water. You know, we're totally making things that are
Speaker 4: more efficient than use of fertilizer, heat resistance. These are
Speaker 4: all things that are pretty well known, but it needed
Speaker 4: technology to be able to do them. And and and
Speaker 4: you think about it, but diseases in Saskatchewan used to
Speaker 4: be in Alabama, and so they be able to actually
Speaker 4: be and it's not like one thing you're just going
Speaker 4: to have to keep updating it. And so there's no
Speaker 4: question that that that they need us to be successful.
Speaker 1: And in terms and when you think about something like
Speaker 1: the seed vault, for example, how do you rate the
Speaker 1: effectedness of that moving forward?
Speaker 4: It's hard for me to have a strong opinion on
Speaker 4: that without getting in trouble totally fair, you know, I
Speaker 4: think it's a really important thing. But for the moment,
Speaker 4: you know, we're dealing with major seed companies who like us,
Speaker 4: no farmers have a challenge. And then and the good
Speaker 4: thing is that the seed companies aren't resisting us. They
Speaker 4: think it's a really important technology for them and they're
Speaker 4: working with That's that's me My biggest takeaway.
Speaker 2: Is it about increasing productivity or just increasing the likelihood
Speaker 2: of just having a good crop.
Speaker 4: It's hard to differentiate those two topics. So because you're
Speaker 4: for some disease traits, it's not it doesn't exist everywhere.
Speaker 4: It's just sort of you you're increasing your probability that
Speaker 4: your crop. There's like a yes or nos. You're saying,
Speaker 4: how do I do something that says every five years
Speaker 4: I die? So I'm pay you a little bit to
Speaker 4: not have that happen, And so that everything you're doing
Speaker 4: is trying to make the statistical odds of that crop
Speaker 4: performing the way you wanted to crop, because you don't
Speaker 4: really know what the weather is going to be every season.
Speaker 4: But that's what they're all paying for.
Speaker 3: What I wanted to ask you is I'm thinking about
Speaker 3: our audience.
Speaker 2: You're listening and hopefully everybody's following along, you know, because
Speaker 2: that's pretty heavy stuff in terms of what you guys
Speaker 2: are doing, and I just think about, you know, in
Speaker 2: terms of an investment audience, how should they be thinking
Speaker 2: about what you are doing about food production more broadly,
Speaker 2: because things are changing, things are being disrupted, there's lots
Speaker 2: of innovation going on. I think food and agg production
Speaker 2: have really lagged in terms of some innovation.
Speaker 3: Beyond Yeah, I.
Speaker 4: Have like a simpler thing because we have these five
Speaker 4: major crops and we've already working. Like in Canola, we
Speaker 4: have four different traits we're working on, and each of
Speaker 4: them are as big as the next one because you're
Speaker 4: solving different problems. I almost like to look at a
Speaker 4: crop as almost like a therapeutic area, and each of
Speaker 4: the traits are indication. So like in Canola, our first
Speaker 4: indication has been approved and they're launching it, and the
Speaker 4: following indications are in the field and we expect to
Speaker 4: a launch so soon thereafter. These end up being really
Speaker 4: equivalent to giant, billion dollar therapeutic areas. So there's the
Speaker 4: trade I said on BT which makes its kills insects
Speaker 4: to be reduced insecticide use. That trait is now on
Speaker 4: three hundred million acres and they're getting fifteen dollars an acre.
Speaker 4: So that's the size, the scale of the change as
Speaker 4: an investment thesis, the scale that we can address, right,
Speaker 4: is this huge?
Speaker 3: Why is the EU decision so important?
Speaker 4: The EU decision is critical because they started the anti
Speaker 4: GMO movement and they're going to end it. Let's see,
Speaker 4: we joke that the revolution started yesterday. It was really
Speaker 4: important for them to step up and say, because.
Speaker 3: They're comfortable with this, this is different.
Speaker 4: Yes, let's focus on chemicals they want to get at
Speaker 4: the same time they're doing this. They want to get
Speaker 4: rid of fungicides. I want to get rid of inseecticides.
Speaker 4: They can't do it unless we work, and so it's
Speaker 4: really important. But Europe, a lot of the places the
Speaker 4: same with medical devices. A lot of places outside of
Speaker 4: the US follow Europe more than they follow US, and
Speaker 4: so Africa. When the US does this, all of Africa,
Speaker 4: which has been pangmos too, will suddenly start allowing it.
Speaker 4: So it's really important for a lead globally.
Speaker 1: Is gene editing when we bring you back on a
Speaker 1: year from now, is gene editing going to start to
Speaker 1: become a household understood topic.
Speaker 4: I totally think when Europe passes this and people realize
Speaker 4: what it is. I think it'll be a totally understood topic.
Speaker 4: It's easier in humans because humans every disease is a
Speaker 4: little bit different. This you can I know it sounds
Speaker 4: complicated that way I'm describing it, but it's really pretty
Speaker 4: simple to think that with a couple of changes, suddenly
Speaker 4: you if you're in Arizona, suddenly your main crop can
Speaker 4: be grown there right, right right, and that love it.
Speaker 4: People will get there right and that's so I do
Speaker 4: think they'll understand it and support it.
Speaker 3: I tease that I was going to ask you about AI.
Speaker 2: Does AI impact what you guys do potentially or generative
Speaker 2: AI machine learning? Does it help you in the process
Speaker 2: or maybe not yet because it's there's still questions about
Speaker 2: the reliability.
Speaker 4: It's impossible for anybody any scientific field to say AI
Speaker 4: will not have an impact. And genomics, it's pretty cool.
Speaker 3: I appreciate that from a scientist, is.
Speaker 4: That there's thirty thousand genes in these plants to produce
Speaker 4: proteins and in different conditions. So any sort of computer
Speaker 4: modeling which allows you to understand relationships better and put
Speaker 4: them together will always have an impact because you're trying
Speaker 4: to understand better how the diseases of this plant affect
Speaker 4: diseases in this plant, and so it's a fundamental part
Speaker 4: of this industry. And the cool thing is these plants
Speaker 4: all have similar structures. They're a little bit different, but
Speaker 4: if you solve it in one, suddenly you can use
Speaker 4: AI type technologies to make sure you understand how to
Speaker 4: do it.
Speaker 3: And the rest of them, well, really fascinating.
Speaker 2: My mind's kind of blowing a little bit, but kind
Speaker 2: of love this and let us know how things are going.
Speaker 2: It's really interesting, fascinating, something new.
Speaker 4: Thanks for having me. It's a treat. We're desperately trying
Speaker 4: to let people understand what this new technology so for
Speaker 4: you said is really important, and we get it at
Speaker 4: the place that people understand it and accept.
Speaker 3: So appreciate it.
Speaker 2: Rory Riggs, chief executive officer of CEBIS, joining us here
Speaker 2: in Bloomberg Interactive Brokers Studio