Full Press Release Details
founded in 2010 and incorporated in Delaware. Calyxt is a plant-based synthetic biology company that leverages its proprietary PlantSpring technology platform to engineer plant metabolism to
produce innovative, high-value plant-based chemistries for use in customers materials and products. As plant-based solutions, the Company s synthetic biology products can be used in helping customers meet their sustainability targets and
financial goals. The Company is focused on developing these synthetic biology solutions for customers in large and differentiated end markets, including the cosmeceutical, nutraceutical, and pharmaceutical industries, which are the Company s
initial target markets.
The Company will produce its plant-based chemistries in its proprietary BioFactoryTM production system. This strategic initiative was announced in October 2021. In the context of the Company s PlantSpring technology platform and BioFactory production system, the term
sustainable , as used herein, refers to the plant-based chemistry production methods that use plant biomass as a raw material and are therefore renewable and do not completely use up or destroy natural resources.
The Company also out-licenses elements of the PlantSpring technology platform, has historically
developed seed-trait product candidates for the traditional agriculture market, and may selectively develop products for customers in traditional agriculture. For example, in the third quarter of 2021, the Company announced it had entered into a
research collaboration with a global food ingredient manufacturer based in Asia to develop an improved soybean capable of producing oil that would serve as a commercial alternative to palm oil.
The Company was previously focused on the development of traits for traditional agriculture that it planned to commercialize using either a
vertically integrated or licensing business model. The Company s first commercial product, a high oleic soybean, was launched in this manner in the first quarter of 2019. In August 2020, the Company announced it was winding down the vertically
integrated soybean product line. The wind-down of this product line was completed in late 2021 with the final sales of soybean grain to a large soybean processor. The Company s second product, an improved digestibility alfalfa, was developed
with and licensed to S&W Seed Company (S&W). S&W is pursuing regulatory clearance for their product candidate and is targeting commercialization in 2022 at which time the Company expects to begin to receive royalty payments. The Company
intends to use this licensing strategy for other historically developed, traditional agriculture seed-trait product candidates.
Company has historically operated in a single segment primarily within the United States and its assets are located within the United States.
Prior to its initial public offering (IPO) on July 25, 2017, the Company was a wholly owned subsidiary of Cellectis S.A. (Cellectis). As
of December 31, 2021, Cellectis owned 61.8 percent of the Company s issued and outstanding common stock. Cellectis has certain contractual rights as well as rights pursuant to the Company s certificate of incorporation and
bylaws, in each case, for so long as it maintains threshold beneficial ownership levels in the Company s shares.
The PlantSpring Technology
Platform, AIML Capabilities, and Calyxt s Development Process
The PlantSpring technology platform is founded on the
Company s more than a decade of experience engineering plant metabolism and incorporates its scientific knowledge, its proprietary systems, tools and technologies, and an expanding set of artificial intelligence and machine learning (AIML)
capabilities. Through the PlantSpring platform, the Company seeks to unleash the natural capabilities of plants the original biological systems and make available commercial innovations that produce unique plant-based chemistries from
plant species, including rare or undomesticated species, in a manner that the Company believes is more robust and sustainable than other methods of production.
Plants naturally produce many chemistries that may be valuable inputs for end products. Of
the approximately 170,000 known and classified compounds derived from plants, bacteria, and fungi, approximately 78 percent are derived from plants. Moreover, some estimates suggest that there may be up to one million additional chemical compounds
yet to be discovered.
However, the yield of plant-based chemistries that occurs naturally may be insufficient for commercialization using
traditional production methods, the plant that produces the chemistry may be scarce in nature or difficult to harvest, or there may be a socioeconomic concern with the harvest of the plant producing the chemistry. Additionally, the quality or
quantity of a natural plant chemistry may be inconsistent, varying considerably over each variety, harvest, or field, and can be impacted by different contaminants in the soil where grown.
In PlantSpring, the Company identifies metabolic pathways to produce plant-based chemistries, designs strategies to reprogram host cells,
engineers plant cell metabolism to optimally produce targeted compounds, and produces those targeted compounds at laboratory scale.
Company has implemented AIML capabilities for the identification of targets for editing specific genetic pathways and continues to develop AIML capabilities across the PlantSpring platform, which will enable learning and adaptation of knowledge
gained from past activity and are expected to be combined with predictive analytics to rapidly prototype and provide feedback, accelerate the time to complete the development cycle and help mitigate the risk associated with commercial scale-up. The Company expects to leverage its deep scientific experience and vast amounts of data that it has accumulated over its history, including a large proprietary database of genomic information across
numerous plant species, in its future AIML development efforts.
The Company uses an efficient development process to deliver innovation
through PlantSpring platform, leveraging its extensive knowledge of plants and their metabolism when developing a plant-based chemistry. The Company s synthetic biology product development process is comprised of three primary stages: Design,
Engineer, and Verify. The development process is also designed to use an iterative learning mechanism through which accumulated knowledge is leveraged. As the Company expands and develops its AIML capabilities, Calyxt intends to utilize them
throughout the balance of the PlantSpring development cycle. The typical timeline to complete the Design-Engineer-Verify process is currently estimated at twelve months, at which point the verified chemistry would advance to pilot production. With
the expansion and further deployment of its AIML capabilities and systematic learning as additional compounds move through the development process, the Company expects this development cycle time may be accelerated. Additional development time is
required to achieve commercial scale for compounds to be produced in the BioFactory production system, as discussed below.
The Company is in the process of implementing AIML more broadly to assist in the identification of pathways and targets, and in scaling
production beyond the laboratory. The Company has a near term focus of
expanding current AIML capabilities in the Design and Engineer phases of development and expanding AIML capabilities toward optimizing pilot production, reducing production variables and
designing critical steps in the scale-up process.
As the Company incorporates AIML techniques
further into its development process it has the aim of accelerating development cycles and reducing development costs, improving and influencing its rapid prototyping capabilities, and discovering new pathways or new plant-derived compounds for
future commercialization efforts. Because of the promise of AIML and the Company s focus on expanding its AIML capabilities, the Company believes it will be able to develop compounds in plants for customers at faster speeds than its competitors
in the synthetic biology industry.
Commercialization Strategies
The Company intends to commercialize its PlantSpring technology platform using three strategies: (i) the development and sale of
high-value synthetic biology products from the Company s proprietary BioFactory production system, (ii) the licensing of elements of the PlantSpring technology platform and historically developed, traditional agriculture seed-trait product
candidates, and (iii) selective product development for customers in traditional agriculture. The Company s current focus is on development of synthetic biology products for its customers using its BioFactory production system.
The BioFactory Production System
BioFactory is a bioreactor-based production system that is designed to be capable of continuous production of plant-based chemistries. The bioreactor can be of any size depending upon factors including yield and titer necessary to reach the required
commercial scale. For production, multicellular Plant Cell MatrixTM (PCM ) structures are placed inside the bioreactor, and hormone-free
growth media bathes the PCM structures to provide them with nutrition, which differentiates the Company s process from other methods that require complete submersion of cells in growth media and/or the application of hormones to facilitate
growth. A PCM structure is a living system of various cell types, which is designed to emulate the intercellular metabolism of an entire plant, that grows over time and produces and stores, or excretes, the target chemistries. The growth media is
the feedstock of the BioFactory production system and contains the essential inputs to support growth of the PCM structures and necessary chemistry production. The growth media is expected to be reused throughout the production cycle, which may run
for an extended time period. To scale production in the BioFactory productions system, the Company expects to move the PCM structures from its current bioreactor into larger capacity bioreactors or groups of bioreactors.
The Company began running lab-scale bioreactors in early 2021. The Company s first pilot-scale
bioreactor became operational in December 2021 and is scalable up to 200 liters. Since activation of the pilot-scale bioreactor, the Company has successfully produced
proof-of-concept compounds ovalbumin, a plant-based protein, and betanin, a red colorant typically derived from beets. The pilot stage of development takes a
compound developed with the PlantSpring platform through to commercial production. Depending on the compound to be produced, there may be a range of vessel sizes between the initial pilot facility and the commercial production facility. The
Company s current plan is to engage third parties, referred to as infrastructure partners, for at-scale commercial production. Infrastructure partners are likely to be companies with processing assets
that can be converted from current production to the Company s bioreactor-based approach. If an infrastructure partner is used for production, the Company expects to pay a fee for that production. Because of the expected modular nature of the
BioFactory production system and the types of high value compounds the Company expects to develop for customers, it is also possible that commercial production could also occur in a customer s in-house
facility. The Company expects to expand the scope of its pilot facilities based on customer demand, and the scope of production could extend, subject to regulatory and other considerations, outside the United States.
The Company believes the typical development time from initiation of the pilot stage of
development through to commercialization is 24 months with the customer addressing formulation and regulatory matters. Some industries, such as pharmaceuticals, are expected to have a longer path to regulatory clearance. In combination with the
Design-Engineer-Verify stages of the development process, the timeline to achieve commercial availability is currently estimated at approximately 36 months, subject to potential regulatory extensions for certain industries. As the Company broadens,
develops and deploys its AIML capabilities across the development process, the Company anticipates that this timeline can be accelerated for future development efforts.
In parallel with developing additional AIML capabilities across the PlantSpring platform, the Company is developing its AIML capabilities to
increase the efficiency and productivity of the BioFactory system. Synthesizing plant-based chemistry in the BioFactory system at scale involves optimizing a large number of parameters. AIML approaches to planning, designing, executing, and
analyzing BioFactory production runs are expected to enable the Company to tune the operation of the BioFactory system through prediction and refinement of the optimal operating points for each targeted compound. The enormous amount of data produced
by the BioFactory system will be augmented with synthetic experiments generated from the Company s process models that are expected to enable it to explore and model many more combinations of control settings than can be achieved in the absence
Based on the customer demand-driven approach to product development that the Company is expecting to employ, it anticipates that
the compounds it produces in the BioFactory system will be primarily replacements or enhancements of plant-based chemistries that are hard to source, either because they are scarce in nature or difficult to harvest, or where there may be a
socioeconomic concern with the harvest of the plant producing the chemistry. The Company may also selectively explore the development of high-value and novel plant-based chemistries without a partner and may opt to bring these to market using its
The Company also believes the BioFactory system has the potential to be a highly sustainable synthetic biology production
system because of the BioFactory s production methodology, which relies upon a limited quantity of media and nutrients in a continuous flow system that operates for long periods of time, potentially more than one year, in an operating cycle.
The BioFactory system involves fewer of the sustainability challenges associated with other traditional plant-based indoor and outdoor production systems, including excess heating, cooling, fertilizer and pesticide uses, and because the BioFactory
does not use fermentation, there is no off-gassing, the media can be recycled, and only depleted components are replaced resulting in lower waste levels. This production method is expected to align well with
customers goals of replacing existing compounds that may be scarce in nature, have an unstable supply chain, cannot be produced through fermentation or other similar methods, or are currently produced in a
non-sustainable process, with high-value, sustainable, plant-based synthetic biology compounds.
As a result, the Company believes that in combination its PlantSpring technology platform and its BioFactory production system are capable of
unlocking the power of plants to produce high value and complex plant-based chemistries that are finite, that are difficult to source sustainably, that may not be able to be produced through other production systems, or that cannot be produced as
efficiently in single cell plant culture systems.
go-to-market strategy for BioFactory-produced compounds is expected to be customer demand-driven. The strategy encompasses customer needs, the Company s development
and production capabilities, and seeks to drive financial returns throughout the product s lifecycle. The Company has developed a set of criteria it employs to evaluate customer-driven opportunities and ensure focus for its development efforts.
Those criteria include the nature of the customers need, the capabilities of the BioFactory system, the estimated size of the customers demand for targeted compound, the customers anticipated speed of adoption, and potential
The Company currently targets having two to four plant-based chemistries in its development
process by the end of 2022 and each year thereafter.
From a financial standpoint, the Company anticipates that its customers may fund the
development of their compounds, and once at-scale production is achieved, the customers are expected to purchase their compounds from the Company pursuant to supply agreements. The Company also anticipates
that customers will be responsible for any regulatory activities associated with development of their commissioned compounds.
Licensing & Product Development for Agriculture
In addition to the core demand-driven synthetic biology solutions to be
executed through the PlantSpring platform and the BioFactory system, the Company maintains the capability to implement broad technology licensing arrangements and to selectively develop agricultural products. The Company may pursue commercial
opportunities for the licensing of elements of the PlantSpring technology platform as well as historically developed, traditional agriculture seed-trait product candidates.