Could CRISPR Genome Editing Technology Impact Your Business?

One of the SciTech trends I’m currently paying attention to is how scientists are developing CRISPR genome editing technology. When fully developed, it will dramatically affect food product manufacturers, the farming industry, and consumers. Many communities cannot produce enough food products for their population because of natural disasters, climate change, and other destructive factors. But food security is not the only area of importance. It will greatly impact several industries, especially healthcare and the pharmaceutical space. It promises to be disruptive and transformative when and if it enters the mainstream market. What do you need to understand about how it could impact your business?

As I explained in my blog last week – Anticipating The Next Disruptive Technologies Is Hard But Essential – companies face existential threats when they fail to correctly anticipate how technologies are changing and fail to make necessary adjustments and investments to capitalize on those changes.

What Is CRISPR Genome Editing?

CRISPR genome editing is in the arena of synthetic food – foods created from ingredients that are not farm derived. There is now an entire ecosystem of synthetic food because of the lack of farmable land in many communities around the world as a result of natural disasters, climate change, and other environmental issues.

CRISPER editing uses large-scale computational technologies in order to create very specific genetic access to a crop. It creates a unique genome to engineer a plant.

CRISPR editing has been used in the past to genetically modify crops for pest resistance. And there is a market now for companies that want to be able to continually supply non-animal protein food products to the world.

Innovation Through CRISPR Genome Editing

I talked with Richard Sear, Managing Partner at Everest Group, last week about the trend in developing CRISPER genome editing for innovation in food products. He said the goal now is to create a new kind of plant for food.

“The goal is to advance the use of nutraceuticals to create healthy food by embedding pharmacological products into a food substance. Many existing food ingredients are incompatible with nutraceutical infusion,” Richard says.

“An example would be something like a chocolate bar that a person with heart disease previously couldn’t eat. But the new product could deliver the person’s heart medication at the same time because it would be chemically embedded into the chocolate bar.”

Is there such a thing as a healthy chocolate bar? Just Google that question, and your search will turn up several recent articles on that topic and companies touting their products.

Richard comments, “If the cacao beans are synthetically created, can we deliver other things, such as pharmaceuticals, into that chocolate bar without ruining the taste? And can we diminish the harm that a normal chocolate bar, such as weight gain, would bring to someone who eats it?”

As food companies and as individuals, we need to think about food security for our future. If we could create new foods through CRISPR genome editing, would they be welcome? Under what conditions would people be willing to consume such foods?

Can such food products be productive, and would they be environmentally efficient? Richard says most of the work being done in CRISPR for engineered technology for food security is focused on those issues and on the quality aspect around nutraceutical innovation.

When Could It Get To Market?

What remains to be accomplished in the journey to get the CRISPR genome editing technology to market to change the way one can create seeds? Will it, in fact, get to the market?

That social receptivity is one of the factors that scientists now track in the technology’s development. Some people may have religious or ethical issues with it. Will people be willing to eat such foods?

There is also a lot of regulatory pushback in some countries regarding this technology. The regulatory environment is much stronger and less open to innovation in China and Europe, with the regulations in the US more relaxed and concussive to innovation. These differences in the regulatory climate will significantly affect both where these technologies are developed and how these innovations will be adopted by consumers.

Companies that want to track the development of this new technology – to understand when it could be disruptive in their industry and business – must leverage the capability to track all components of its development and put it into a scenario with a projected timeline. This will give them an understanding of constraints impacting the development and confidence to know whether and when to invest in it.

Progress in the regulatory and legislative trends, as well as social receptivity, are two of those components.

There are four stages in developing CRISPR editing. Most issues in the first three stages have been resolved. Two areas in the fourth stage still need to be solved:

1. It requires an enormous amount of compute power to establish and run the models.

2. Scientists currently lack enough workable data.

The Compute Power Issue. There is a current constraint on the size of data centers and the ability to build and operate that compute power at the scale necessary to drive the models. It is necessary to build compute power large enough to go from simple models to more complex models and used in a wider range of plants and proteins.

The compute power must also be accessible for a wide number of people at an appropriate price point that is useful at the scale of being able to develop and run the models.

The Lack of Enough Data. Currently, there are not enough data sets, which prevents building and deploying scale models. Richard explains that there are not yet enough crop producing yields, so there is limited information in understanding the genetics of a plant.

But make no mistake. CRISPR genome editing is on the horizon, and it will be disruptive.