Pairwise’s Fulcrum™ Platform Creates Pivot Point for Enterprise-Scale Gene Editing

New CRISPR technology and custom gene editing tools will help accelerate innovation in agricultural product portfolios, supply chains, and production systems.

DURHAM, N.C.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Pairwise, a health-focused food and agriculture company that is transforming the way that we eat, today announced the launch of its Fulcrum™ Platform. The platform, built on proprietary CRISPR technology along with other custom gene editing tools, further positions Pairwise at the vanguard of being able to make complex changes to plant genetics quickly and successfully, leading to innovative enterprise-scale applications. Pairwise is applying this game-changing platform approach to both its own Conscious™ Foods branded products, and to the specialty and commodity crop products of its business partners.

“With the Fulcrum platform, we can make small genetic changes that deliver big product impacts. We call this approach the Seismic Tweak,” said Ian Miller, Chief Development Officer at Pairwise. “The fact that we’ve gone from concept to product in just four years, with the recent launch of our gene edited Conscious™ Greens, demonstrates our ability to solve complex challenges for society and industry alike at the pace demanded by today’s marketplace.”

Pairwise is among the first companies in the world to commercialize food developed using CRISPR gene editing technology. Earlier this month, the company rolled out its first branded product, Conscious™ Greens, in the foodservice channel through a partnership with Performance Food Group. Additionally, via a five-year partnership with Bayer, Pairwise used the Fulcrum platform to identify nearly 200 unique gene sequences that can be changed to improve productivity and disease resistance across ​a variety of row crops, including a unique target in corn that has increased kernel rows by up to 20%.

“Our partnership with Bayer shows what our Fulcrum Platform is capable of achieving,” added Miller.

Since its founding five years ago, Pairwise has evolved a suite of industry-leading tools, including unique CRISPR intellectual property (IP), that enables the company to edit genes more effectively than other companies in the market. Novel Pairwise-developed technologies that underpin the Fulcrum platform include REDRAW™, or RNA encoded DNA replacement of alleles with CRISPR, a precise templated editing toolbox that can make any type of small edit at CRISPR-targeted sites. Another tool is SHARC™, a proprietary enzyme that works well for cutting, base editing, and REDRAW editing, a combination that’s created a foundational, game-changing genome editing toolkit.

SHARC, REDRAW and Pairwise’s other proprietary base-editing tools allow for precise changes at virtually any location in a genome, an approach that holds huge potential not only in agriculture, but in other fields as well, such as medicine. Anchored by the Fulcrum Platform and the company’s deep technical and agronomic expertise in over 60 crops, Pairwise is leading the way in genetics-based innovation in plants and plant-based systems.

Learn more about the Fulcrum Platform here. [https://vimeo.com/821292921]

About Pairwise: Driven by the belief that healthy food should be consistently fresh, delicious, and convenient, Pairwise brings together leaders in agriculture, technology, and consumer foods to harness the transformative potential of new genomics technologies to create innovative new products. Pairwise is working to develop new varieties of crops, and to partner with organizations that seek to drive innovation and access across the plant-based economy. The company was founded by Chief Executive Officer Tom Adams and Chief Business Officer Haven Baker, with scientific co-founders J. Keith Joung, Professor of Pathology at Harvard Medical School, David Liu, Director of the Merkin Institute of Transformative Technologies in Healthcare, and Vice-Chair of the Faculty at the Broad Institute of Harvard and MIT; and Feng Zhang, McGovern Investigator and a professor at MIT. For more information, visit www.pairwise.com.