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.
"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.
Read more at St. Louis Magazine