Bayer Crop Science Collaborates with Switch Bioworks

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On Monday, Switch Bioworks announced a strategic collaboration with Bayer Crop Science:

I have went into detail on Switch Bioworks before, specifically in The Insight is the Edge: Switch Bioworks, but the simplest way to explain Switch, and the way it was framed to me specifically by founder and CEO Tim Schnabel, is that they are fixing an energy problem inside a microbe.

Breaking the bond in atmospheric nitrogen takes a lot of energy, and in nature a microbe will often only fix as much as it needs for itself. Engineering a strain to overproduce ammonia and hand it to the plant means asking it to spend energy on something that does nothing for its own survival. An "always on" strain has that energy expenditure from the day it hits the soil, which can hinder its growth and its ability to compete in the soil with native microbes.

Acknowledging that tradeoff, and genetically engineering microbial strains to be able to manage it is the driver behind the company, where their answer is a genetic “switch.”

The microbe spends its early life growing and colonizing the root, and once it is established the switch flips and it starts producing and sharing nitrogen. Switch is not eliminating the trade-off between growth and nitrogen production, but it manages it by inserting a trait into the microbe that ensures the microbe focuses on establishment first, then switches into nitrogen production.

What I think is interesting about Switch is that it is the switch that is the asset, not the microbe fixing nitrogen strain. The "grow first, produce second" control system can in principle be applied to other microbes and agriculture related functions. Phosphorus solubilization microbes are another obvious example in agriculture.

That makes Switch a product development platform rather than a company licensing a library of wild-type microbes.

The trade-off can be regulatory. However, Switch has navigated established EPA and USDA biotechnology regulatory pathways to secure authorization for first-in-class field trials of its engineered microbial fertilizer at multiple sites in the Midwest US. More recently, Brazil’s CTNBio approved the company’s dossiers, advancing it toward field testing there. These milestones enable real-world evaluation and data generation to support continued development toward commercialization.

Switch has proven capable of clearing many technical and regulatory hurdles. One that all start-ups can benefit from support on though is scaling commercially.