Key Takeaways
- Flagship Pioneering has unveiled Terrana Biosciences, a company developing RNA-based agricultural solutions that deliver protective and enhanced crop traits without altering the plant genome.
- Terrana emerges after four years of platform development, with an initial commitment of $50 million from Flagship Pioneering to scale operations and develop its first crop protection and yield products.
- The company's platform has already produced three novel technology classes, demonstrated proof of concept in tomatoes, corn, and soy, and built a pipeline of more than 15 potential products across specialty and row crops.
- Terrana's leadership includes CEO Ryan Rapp, Executive Chairman Ignacio Martinez, Chief Technology Officer Matthew Lingard, and a board featuring Flagship founder Noubar Afeyan and longtime agriculture executive Hugh Grant.
- Terrana's RNA-based products are designed to be applied at any point in a plant's lifecycle, intended to be more adaptive to climate fluctuations than conventional crop protection approaches.
Flagship Pioneering Unveils Terrana Biosciences
Flagship Pioneering, the bioplatform innovation company, has unveiled Terrana Biosciences, a company pioneering RNA-based agricultural solutions designed to deliver protective and enhanced crop traits without altering the plant genome. Through its proprietary RNA technology platform, Terrana is developing targeted products intended to work at any point in a plant's lifecycle, aiming for a continuous pipeline that adapts to variable climate conditions and can generate new solutions faster and at lower cost than conventional crop protection approaches.
“At Flagship Pioneering, we build groundbreaking platforms that address the world's most pressing challenges. With Terrana, we are bringing an entirely new dimension of innovation to agriculture through similar RNA technology that we pioneered in human health. This approach will empower farmers with precise, adaptive solutions to combat threats to crops in fields and orchards and enhance resiliency, sustainability, and productivity in the global food system,” said Noubar Afeyan, Ph.D., Co-Founder of Terrana and Founder and CEO of Flagship Pioneering.
How Terrana's RNA Platform Works
Trees and crops naturally use a vast ecosystem of self-replicating RNAs to influence trait expression, functioning as a kind of native language that helps communicate traits like growth, stress response, and development. Using AI and computational models, Terrana has assembled a library of RNAs and built a design system for efficient assembly of novel functional crop traits.
The platform has already created three novel technology classes, demonstrated proof of concept in tomatoes, corn, and soy, and generated a pipeline of more than 15 potential products in specialty and row crops. Terrana's solutions are designed for amplification, mobility within plants, stability across different environments, and heritability across plant generations — attributes the company says help its products avoid trade-offs common to existing approaches, which are often limited to specific points in a plant's life cycle and can carry negative environmental impacts.
“RNA-based technology has delivered lifesaving advancements in human health. We are now applying this same approach to reimagine what's possible for agriculture. Using the language of nature, we can give plants new instructions, yielding adaptable solutions rooted directly in the plant's natural physiology. Our approach opens a new world of possibilities in annual and perennial crops for the benefit of farmers, people and the planet,” said Ignacio Martinez, Co-Founder and Executive Chairman of Terrana and General Partner at Flagship Pioneering.
Flagship Pioneering's $50 Million Initial Commitment
Flagship Pioneering has committed an initial $50 million to Terrana to scale operations and develop its first products in crop protection and yield. The company emerges after four years of platform development inside the Flagship ecosystem, joining other agriculture-focused ventures such as Inari and Indigo Agriculture within Flagship's broader portfolio of more than 40 companies.
“Today, farmers make many important and costly decisions about seeds, fertilizers and crop protection before the crop year even begins, requiring them to rely on projections and historical trends from prior growing seasons rather than responding to real-time conditions on the ground. What's more, the increased pace of climate fluctuations and disease threats far exceeds today's slow and expensive R&D processes, leaving farmers all too often behind the curve. Terrana's ability to unlock all aspects of seed and crop traits in plants enables an entirely new set of agile solutions that can be applied at any time in the growing season, from seed to postharvest,” said Ryan Rapp, Co-Founder and CEO of Terrana Biosciences and Origination Partner at Flagship Pioneering.
Terrana's Leadership and Board
In addition to Rapp, Terrana's leadership team includes Matthew Lingard, Chief Technology Officer of Terrana and Senior Principal at Flagship Pioneering, Folashade Sabitu, Head of Regulatory, and Ramtin Ahmadi, Vice President of Strategy and Operations. The company's board of directors includes Martinez, longtime agriculture industry leader Hugh Grant, Invaio CEO and Flagship CEO-Partner Amy O'Shea, and Flagship's Chair of Asia Pacific and Strategic Advisor André Andonian.
Founded by Flagship Pioneering in 2021, Terrana is positioned to apply RNA-based crop technology across both annual and perennial crops, with the company's early proof-of-concept work spanning major row and specialty crop categories.
