When will CRISPR gene editing be widely adopted in farming — and what are the blockages?

Ferdinand Los | April 20, 2022

This article or excerpt is included in the GLP’s daily curated selection of ideologically diverse news, opinion and analysis of biotechnology innovation.

If you’re involved in animal or plant sciences, you’ve been reading about CRISPR technology for many years. Ranging from the promise to solve major societal issues to a Nobel prize, CRISPR has been making headlines.

Here’s the thing: it has amazing potential and we’re so close to seeing some of that potential come to life, but it has been a long road.

For any emerging technology, from discovery to actually becoming a tool that can be used on a large scale, there are many steps and obstacles. CRISPR is no different. For our company and many others there have been steep learning curves and challenges to get us to where we are today.

Policymakers, consumers and farmers

One of the biggest and most critical first steps, outside of technical challenges, was—and is—consumer acceptance and explaining this technology to policymakers. Over the first several years, we spent a lot of time educating potential customers of what this means for them.

For farmers, the advantage is obvious. We can help them increase yield potentials, for example through defensive traits such as disease tolerance. For consumers, it took more discussion about what this means for them, but it has become clear they are generally quite open to the introduction of beneficial traits, for example that help cope with environmental challenges of farming, prevent food allergies, and so on.

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From a policy perspective, policy makers have been working to create an understanding about CRISPR, its safety and its benefits and we now see legislation evolving worldwide. More and more countries are welcoming CRISPR and gene-edited technologies with open arms: The U.S. is finalizing regulation that would allow gene-editing technology to be considered a conventional crop, under the condition that the outcome could eventually be achieved by conventional breeding. Several countries in South America recently finalized similar regulation. And in recent months, the UK, Switzerland and China have all signaled to start taking legislative steps towards regulating CRISPR-edited crops as non-GMO. (More information on the current status of CRISPR regulation globally.)

Judging by these changes I think that the message has largely landed in the market now that CRISPR breeding is way faster than traditional breeding and enables types of breeding that would be impossible with traditional breeding, in a non-transgenic fashion.

We’re seeing that people do understand what’s going on. You can see that that on the consumer side, largely people look at this much more favorably than they do at the traditional GMO (transgenic) crops.

Research versus reputation

However, communication is still needed. Many companies are using this technology in R&D and breeding, but few are actually marketing products made using CRISPR. We see many companies holding back on putting crops into the market because they still consider consumer acceptance as a risk and fear for their brands’ reputations.

We’re here to continue developing the technology as well as continue the conversation with researchers, breeders, seed companies, policymakers, and other organizations with an interest in molecular breeding so that new crop varieties developed with CRISPR can benefit from a faster route-to-market that is both democratized and beneficial to everyone.

Ferdinand Los is CSO of Hudson River Biotechnology.  Ferdinand holds advanced degrees in sciences including  a PhD from the University of California San Diego and post-doctoral work at Colombia University. You can check out Hudson River Biotechnology on Twitter @HudsonRiverBio1

A version of this article was posted to Seed World and is used here with permission. You can check out Seed World on Twitter @SeedWorldGroup

The GLP featured this article to reflect the diversity of news, opinion and analysis. The viewpoint is the author’s own. The GLP’s goal is to stimulate constructive discourse on challenging science issues.

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