MIT spinout to expand pathogen-fighting microbe solution for crops

ROBIGO, a biotech spanout from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), has secured more than a quarter-of-a-million dollars to ramp up the trials for its microbe solution for the agriculture industry.

The team, based in Massachusetts, has engineered self-replicating microbes to fight off pathogens in crops, which it has found to be just as effective as chemical pesticides.

Co-founder Andee Wallace said Robigo used principles typically found in medicine, namely RNA interference (RNAi) and CRISPR, to develop microbes that could target specific plant pathogens.

With extreme weather conditions caused by climate change, farmers across the world have had to rely more heavily on pesticides to fight off crop disease. The industry spends around $80bn/y on pesticides, which experts have found worrying as pesticides can negatively affect biodiversity, soil and groundwater. Research has even found that pesticide residue has been present in bee colonies and other non-target organisms.

Wallace said: “Chemical pesticides have been a cornerstone of agricultural production for the past 70 years, to the point that it’s nearly impossible to envision an agricultural system without them.

“But that’s the long-term vision we have: providing growers new tools to enable a food system that is in balance with the environment, and that is productive, resilient and safe.”

Developing technology

With fellow MIT co-founders Jai Padmakumar and Connor Sweeney, Wallace spun out Robigo in 2021, collaborating with MIT’s Venture Mentoring Service and MIT Sandbox to get operations off the ground.

The company joins a revolution in the agriculture industry of moving towards biological pesticide solutions, which use natural products and peptide and RNA technology.

Robigo’s biotechnology platform ARGO uses synthetic biology and proprietary computational design processes to engineer match the capability of industry pesticides, while improving the “safety profiles for people and the planet”. The self-replicating function allows the microbes to continuously reproduce and deliver bioactive molecules to crops over the course of a growing season.

The team has also used RNAi to make its microbes more adaptable to target specific pests and diseases.

Wallace said: “To design safer products, we need to be direct in how we’re designing RNAi to target different diseases. Another layer of our technology is what we call RNAi stacking, where we combine multiple RNAi into a single microbe to broaden the spectrum of pathogens we can control with a single product.”

Trial success

Last year, Robigo trialled its microbes on soybean and lettuce crops across the West and Midwestern states in the US. It found that a single application of its microbes could protect the crops from pathogens for a whole season, matching the performance of leading chemical pesticides in the industry. In one trial, the microbes were even found to increase crop yield by 250% compared to the standard pesticide.

The $350,000 funding was awarded by the Massachusetts state government as part of its $9.5m funding package for 36 climatech companies in the state through the Massachusetts Clean Energy Center.

Robigo has said the funding will be used to expand its operations “fourfold”, with the company already partnering with farmers and agrochemical manufacturers to expand its product’s use.

Wallace added: “Over the past nine months, we’ve systematically used our ARGO platform to tackle new opportunities, and we have a number of products in the pipeline we’re working to bring to growers around the world.”