Resurrect Bio and the Re-Engineering of Plant Immune Systems

The crop protection industry is constantly changing.

Chemical active ingredients face mounting regulatory pressure, resistance is building across major pest and disease complexes, and the biological alternatives, while growing, are still limited in availability on a commercial basis.

Meanwhile, the trait side of the business has been heavily focused on herbicide tolerance and insect resistance for decades, with comparatively less innovation on the disease resistance front.

Resurrect Bio is a UK-based ag biotech company attacking this opportunity from an angle I find interesting — rather than introducing foreign genetic material, they're using AI and gene editing to restore immune functions that already exist within crops but have been bred out over decades of yield-focused selection.

The company just closed an $8.1 million Series A round led by Corteva Catalyst, bringing total funding to ~$10.5 million.

What Resurrect Bio Does

Plants have an internal immune system built on something called intracellular receptor proteins called NLRs (Nucleotide-binding Leucine-Rich Repeat proteins). These NLRs function in networks — sensor NLRs detect specific pathogens, then signal through other NLRs that act as central hubs to trigger a plant defense response.

The problem is that pathogens have evolved to fight against it. They secrete suppressor proteins that bind to and disable the helper NLRs. When a single helper node gets shut down, it can shut down the entire system, enabling the pathogen to win.

What modern breeding has done, unintentionally, is often lowered this response. By selecting for yield and uniformity, breeders have often narrowed or silenced the diversity in these immune networks.

The result is that crops become more susceptible to disease.

Resurrect Bio's approach is to identify the molecular interaction between a pathogen's suppressor and the crop's helper NLR, then engineer changes that prevent the pathogen from binding to the helper without compromising its ability to signal. The immune network becomes more capable, allowing the crop to defend more effectively. Once Resurrect Bio has identified the correct NLRs, they can work with the company with the genetics to edit accordingly.

This is where the name "resurrection" comes from as they aren’t adding new genes, which is theoretically positive for regulatory.

For those interested, I read through one specific scientific paper on the concepts that I found useful:

• Resurrection of plant disease resistance proteins via helper NLR bioengineering - Science Advances

FloraFold® and the Discovery Pipeline

The company's discovery engine is called FloraFold®, and it has three components.

First, the AI layer. FloraFold® is a deep learning platform trained specifically on plant-pathogen - protein interactions. FloraFold® is purpose-built for the rapid co-evolutionary dynamics at plant immune binding interfaces. The AI predicts the minimal set of mutations needed to break the pathogen's grip on the helper NLR while preserving the helper's signaling function. This transforms what would otherwise be years of trial-and-error screening into a targeted engineering problem.

Next is the validation step. They take those predictions and test them in-silico and then in real plants. They introduce three components into the plant tissue simultaneously: the pathogen's suppression mechanism, the plant's native immune sensor, and the engineered helper variant. From there, they monitor the plant's response. If the plant cells die at the infection site, it means the immune system recognized the threat and mounted a defense.

Third, the pipeline. Once identified, they work to understand what small changes need to be made in plants and those validated modifications get handed off to commercial partners for deployment via precision gene editing (CRISPR) in commercial varieties, or through marker-assisted selection to introgress natural variants from wild relatives.

The company claims this pipeline delivers a 5x speed improvement over traditional breeding methodologies for disease resistance trait discovery, which is impressive if that’s consistent and scalable.

Where They're Focused

Soybeans are the lead commercial target, with a focus on the U.S. and Brazilian markets. The primary disease targets tell us a lot about where the value proposition is strongest.

1. Soybean Cyst Nematode (SCN) costs U.S. producers $1.5–2 billion annually and is very difficult to manage.

2. Asian Soybean Rust can cause yield losses up to 80% if untreated and requires intensive fungicide programs.

Beyond soybeans, the platform has applicability across the Solanaceae family such as potatoes, tomatoes, peppers where the NRC helper network is particularly well-characterized. Potato late blight (Phytophthora infestans) is a proof-of-concept target.

The company's founders have already published research showing how specific P. infestans effectors suppress host immunity through specific mechanisms.

The IP and Business Model

The intellectual property strategy is built around the helper nodes, which is a seemingly smart position.

A traditional effort might have been to patent a single sensor gene deriving resistance to a single pathogen strain. By patenting modifications to the central signaling hubs, Resurrect Bio's IP effectively covers resistance to multiple diseases simultaneously, since many sensors converge on shared helpers.

Their core patent filing (WO2024121150A1) covers genetically altered plants with mutations in helper NLRs NRC2 and NRC3, including methods for restoring immunity by preventing pathogen suppressor binding. Applications are pending across many jurisdictions, including Australia, Europe, Japan, South Korea, and China.

The commercial model is platform-as-a-service and IP licensing, not finished seed varieties. Revenue comes from two streams: upfront licensing/milestone fees paid by seed companies for access to specific validated trait modifications, and downstream profit sharing such as royalties on every bag of seed sold containing a Resurrect Bio trait.

This ties into what I talked about in Mapping Power in the Seed Value Chain: Who Wins, Who Loses, and Why:

There is only large Trait or Gene Editing companies are likely to become without germplasm, however, that’s where a unique partnership with Corteva can be useful.

The Corteva Partnership and Why It Matters

The Series A being led by Corteva Catalyst is notable because they're a major seed (and crop protection) company with one of the world's deepest germplasm collections. The collaboration explicitly mentions exploring next-generation gene editing to unlock the potential of Corteva's germplasm.

Corteva has been aggressively investing in augmentation of their germplasm with gene editing capabilities, along with biological-based companies:

Corteva has the germplasm (plus full stack capabilities) while Resurrect Bio has the IP to identify which immune modifications those varieties need. The licensing model is designed for this kind of integration.

If the technology delivers in field conditions, Corteva could have a unique pipeline of disease resistance traits that can be stacked into existing commercial lines with minimal genetic disruption, and potentially less regulatory hurdles. Notably, one of the areas Corteva have been emphasizing recently is their new corn disease product. From Chuck Magro in the Corteva Q4 2025 earnings call:

Other investors in the round include AgFunder, SynBioVen, Calculus Capital, and Pymwymic. The company also maintains its relationship with The Sainsbury Laboratory in Norwich, one of the world's leading plant-pathogen research institutions and the origin of the underlying science.

Final Thoughts

Gene-edited crops with changes that could have occurred through traditional breeding, which describes Resurrect Bio's single-nucleotide modifications, should face a lighter regulatory path than traditional GMOs.

The key question going forward is moving it from lab to field. The Corteva partnership is important because it could provide access to the field.

The company also needs to demonstrate durability — pathogens evolved to suppress the original immune system, and the risk that they evolve to overcome the resurrected version is real, even if Resurrect Bio argues that targeting conserved structural features makes adaptation costly for the pathogen.

The crop protection industry needs new modes of action to manage pests and Resurrect Bio is betting that some tools have have been inside the plant all along.