Cibus Confirms its Herbicide Tolerance (HT2) Trait Shows Increased Tolerance to a Novel Herbicide for Weed Control in Canola

The greenhouse results represent an important success milestone in the development of its second-generation of HT2 edited Canola

Cibus expects to initiate seed bulk up for testing in fields in 2025

SAN DIEGO, Nov. 05, 2024 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- Cibus, Inc. (Nasdaq: CBUS), a leading agricultural technology company that develops and licenses plant traits to seed companies for royalties, today announced that its next generation edits for herbicide tolerance (HT2) in Canola have shown increased tolerance to the herbicide in greenhouse testing. With the achievement of this milestone, seed from these edited plants will be utilized to initiate larger scale field testing in the 2025 season. Reaching this critical milestone is another demonstration of complex editing in Canola by Cibus leading to improved trait performance.

HT2 represents an advanced multi-crop herbicide resistant trait within Cibus’ pipeline, building upon the Company’s previously reported work in herbicide tolerant traits such as its developed HT1 and HT3 traits in rice. Cibus believes that its HT2 trait will translate to other crops like Soybean. This development of a novel herbicide tolerance solution utilizing Cibus’ HT2 trait is important as many weeds that impact crop production are becoming resistant to widely used conventional herbicides. A new trait such as HT2 for major crops like Canola has the potential to provide farmers with additional herbicide options to address difficult weeds. Growers often require multiple herbicides applied before and after planting of the crop, and traits like HT2 also have the potential to provide improved weed control with fewer herbicide applications.

Greg Gocal, PhD, Co-Founder, Executive Vice President and Chief Scientific Officer at Cibus, stated, “Our latest greenhouse results once again demonstrate how Cibus’ technologies can accelerate the time to make additional complex edits in Canola. Our team’s detailed biochemical understanding of how plants tolerate herbicide has led to this exciting novel result.”

With this milestone, Cibus continues to advance its strategy to provide a family of traits that improve farmer productivity. The objective of Cibus’ weed management platform is to provide farmers with crop seeds that are tolerant to herbicides, including novel herbicides that further enable new weed management solutions for farmers. This need exists especially for crops that do not currently have GMO herbicide tolerant traits. New solutions like those represented by Cibus’ HT2 trait are expected to help address weeds’ resistant to widely used herbicides like glyphosate and for crops that need multiple herbicide solutions. This milestone is an important testament to the ability of Cibus’ Rapid Trait Development System™ (RTDS®) to develop traits in a materially shorter timeframe than conventional breeding or GMO trait development processes and Cibus’ strategy to build an inventory of herbicide tolerant traits for multiple crops.

Rory Riggs, Co-Founder, Chairman and Chief Executive Officer at Cibus, commented, “HT2 is expected to be our third trait for herbicide tolerance following our two developed traits HT1 and HT3. Together, they are part of Cibus’ strategy to build a family of gene-edited herbicide tolerant traits that could be used across multiple crops either alone or stacked with other developed traits. Traits that make crops tolerant to the major non-selective herbicides are used in over 90% of corn and soybean acres in North and South America. It is expected that gene edited traits for herbicide tolerance will be a benefit for many crops, including those that did not benefit from these GMO traits. In addition, gene editing provides the opportunity to provide herbicide tolerance traits for new generations of herbicides. Our pipeline of these three traits for herbicide tolerance shows the power of our technology to build a gene-edited weed management platform consisting of multiple gene-edited herbicide tolerant traits.”

About Cibus

Cibus is a leading agricultural technology company that develops and licenses plant traits to seed companies for royalties.  Cibus is a leader in the new era of gene-edited trait development, where plant traits (or specific genetic characteristics) that are indistinguishable from traits developed using traditional breeding are now created using gene editing. A key element of Cibus’ technology breakthrough is its patented RTDS^® technology platform: the Trait Machine™-- the industry’s first semi-automated stand-alone trait production facility. Cibus’ Trait Machine™ materially changes the speed, breadth, and scale of trait development. This breakthrough is central to Cibus’ vision for the Future of Breeding: “High Throughput Gene Editing Systems operating as an extension of seed company breeding programs”. The ability to develop complex traits at a fraction of the time and cost of conventional breeding will be critical for addressing the sustainability challenges presented by Climate Change. 

CIBUS CONTACTS:

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