Cibus at LD Micro Main Event: Gene Editing for Future Crops

On Tuesday, 21 October 2025, Cibus Inc. (NASDAQ:CBUS) presented at the LD Micro Main Event XIX Investor Conference, outlining its strategy to harness gene editing technology for agricultural advancements. Interim CEO Peter Beetham highlighted the company’s focus on enhancing crop productivity through a licensing model, while addressing market opportunities and regulatory challenges.

Key Takeaways

• Cibus is leveraging gene editing to improve crop traits like herbicide tolerance and disease resistance.
• The company operates on a licensing model, earning royalties per acre from seed sales.
• A Rapid Trait Development System enables trait delivery in 12-15 months.
• Cibus sees significant market potential, particularly in rice and canola.
• Regulatory advancements in Europe could open substantial new markets.

Strategic Overview

• Cibus aims to unlock nature’s potential by making each acre more productive through gene editing.
• The company targets canola, rice, and soybean, focusing on traits such as herbicide tolerance and disease resistance.
• Cibus distinguishes gene editing from GMOs, citing a faster market entry and favorable regulations.

Business Model

• Cibus employs a licensing model, receiving royalties per acre from seed sales by partners.
• Partners include global brands and seed companies like InterRock and Federals in Latin America.
• New herbicide-tolerant rice traits are set for market launch in Latin America by 2027.

Technology and Pipeline

• The Rapid Trait Development System utilizes computational biology and AI to edit genomes.
• This system allows for trait delivery within 12-15 months, significantly faster than traditional GMO processes.
• Cibus’s pipeline includes traits for rice, canola, and soybean, with a focus on productivity improvements.

Market Opportunity

• Cibus targets a $30-$50 royalty per acre for rice traits, potentially generating $200 million annually from 5 million acres.
• The global rice market spans 412 million acres, with a new partnership in India covering 120 million acres.
• For canola, Sclerotinia resistance could yield a $10-$15 royalty per acre, with a potential $300 million annual revenue from 30 million acres.

Regulatory Environment

• Gene editing benefits from a quicker market entry and favorable regulatory climate compared to GMOs.
• Europe is moving towards a supportive framework, potentially unlocking a 100 million acre market.
• New legislation is anticipated by the end of the year, enhancing market access.

Future Outlook

• Cibus plans to commercialize crop traits globally, with herbicide-tolerant traits launching in Latin America and the US by 2027-2028.
• The company is also developing biofragrances and exploring gene-edited crops for specialized oils.
• Continued expansion of the "trait machine" aims to maintain a 12-15 month development cycle.

Q&A Highlights

• Beetham emphasized the understanding of plant genomes and the benefits of gene editing, such as climate resilience and reduced costs.
• He addressed concerns about labeling, noting that products from plant breeding programs may not require labels.
• Farmers’ preference for buying new seeds annually supports Cibus’s business model.

In conclusion, Cibus’s presentation at the LD Micro Main Event showcased its innovative approach to agriculture through gene editing. For a detailed account, please refer to the full transcript below.

Full transcript - LD Micro Main Event XIX Investor Conference:

Operator: Hello, everyone. Thank you so much for being with us. I have Peter Beetham here, interim CEO of CBIS.

Peter Beetham, Interim CEO, CBIS: Thank you so much. And I’ve got to thank the crowd here because it’s the end of two busy days of speed dating and everyone’s exhausted. So I really appreciate you turning up to hear about CBIS. As she mentioned, I’m Peter Beetham, I’m the interim CEO of CBIS. And we are, as the tagline says, unlocking the power of nature.

There’s some forward looking statements and you’ve all read this many times, I’m sure. I’d like to run through some introduction slides, talk about what we’re really focused on at CBUS. We are listed on the NASDAQ as CBUS. And I’d like to introduce you first to the dream team, as I call it at CBUS. We’ve been together for many, many years.

And myself and Greg Gotchel on the left hand side of this management team slide, co founders of CBUS. We’re based in San Diego. We’ve been here since the early two thousands. We’re both career plant biologists. Have been building a gene editing company for agriculture for many years, and as Greg says, we’re building it from the ground up.

We’ve been very fortunate to enjoy San Diego life for many years. We’ve also been able to attract some great talent in San Diego, particularly plant biologists. Noel Sauer is in charge of our tech development and has been a guiding light for gene editing in agriculture, developing really cool technologies around that space. Carlo Bruz is actually based in Europe. He’s our CFO.

He’s been with many companies, including Syngenta. He’s very has a great depth of knowledge in the seed business globally. And finally, Jason Stokes, our Chief Administration Officer, but also General Counsel, has worked with a number of public companies, and we’re great to have him. He’s the newbie on the team. The rest of us have been here together nearly fifteen years or greater.

So who is CBIS? We are a leading gene editing agricultural trait company focused on productivity traits aimed at making every acre more productive. I’ve spent my career in AgTech. You can tell from my accent, I’m not from here, but originally from Australia, where I worked in overseas aid in South Pacific and Southeast Asia. One of the things I learned very early on in my career was that a lot of really great technology doesn’t get to the farm gate.

And so one of the driving forces for me personally, but also for that dream team I just mentioned, was really delivering productivity traits, making every acre more productive. We’re at a time in the world right now where we do need to be able to feed the world. The planet’s changing, there’s a lot of climate change happening around the world, and it impacts agriculture. Now having said that, we’ve been working in gene editing for a long time, and it’s very exciting, it’s an amazing technology, but we’ve had to really stay focused. We are kids in a candy store.

We’d love to be able to do every crop and lots of different traits. But on the left hand side of this slide, we’re really focused on core platforms which are canola, rice and soybean. And when I say platform, it’s the ability to make edits in a genome of these crops from seed and take it back to a whole plant and deliver it to a customer. As I mentioned, we’re in productivity traits, so weeds, diseases and agronomic traits. I’m talking about here is the ability of the farmer to control their weeds by having herbicide tolerant crops.

They spray the crop, they kill all the weeds, but not the crop. Same with disease, being able to have disease tolerant crops is really important. So they can control disease by genetically, not necessarily spraying a lot of fungicide. And agronomic, making sure that the agronomy of the plant gives the best yield possible. These are all about saving the farmer dollars at the start of their season by when they plant their seed.

The business model at Seabras is licensing traits for royalties. So as we sell a bag of seed or our seed customer partners sell a bag of seed, we collect a royalty per acre on an annual basis. And you can see when you start to create royalties on every acre in seeds, the numbers get very large very quickly. So we’ve been fortunate we’ve got a number of great relationships and collaborations. And on the right hand side of this slide includes some global brands and many seed companies.

Some that you may not recognize like InterRock and Federals, but they’re rice companies in Latin America that are partnered with us and are looking forward to delivering new herbicide tolerant rice traits to the marketplace in 2027. So as I said, we talked about making every Aiken more productive and getting technology to the farm gate. One of our core missions is really the power of gene editing is to seamlessly deliver traits to customers using a time bound and predictable process. What we are able to do is, working with plant breeding companies around the world, is deliver these traits within twelve to fifteen months. In the past with GMO that could take ten years or more and that cycle time was just not good enough.

And so for us to be able to go into their elite genetics, so we materially decrease the timelines, increase the depth of their trait development, and adapt to readily changing needs. And so that’s a really important part of trait development. The commercialisation side of this is all about the time bound and predictable part of this. Getting elite market ready germplasm, which is the seeds, in the hands of seed the companies as soon as possible is what we’re all about. So often people ask, when is gene editing happening?

What’s happening now is happening around the world. We’re in the industry that is allowing productivity traits to get to market faster and so farmers can alleviate some of their constraints on production. As I mentioned on the left hand side of the slide, we’ve got productivity traits, herbicide tolerance, crops that provide farmers with efficient solutions to control weeds. And the best way to show that is on the left hand side of the slide where you see unedited rice when you spray the herbicide that we’ve got the tolerance to, you kill the weeds and the crop. When you edit it, you kill the weeds but not the crop.

So often people think, well, you spray more chemistry. That’s actually not the fact. What happens is you have a more efficient system, so farmers don’t need to spray as much herbicide and you replace that with biology, replace that with great genetics. As I mentioned, we’re moving those to launch in 2027 in Latin America. On the right hand side of the slide, we talk about sustainable ingredients.

It seems a bit of a segue away from seeds, but really this is in the same business model. We’re able to produce a natural form of fragrance using a yeast platform. So again, we use the understanding of gene editing and the understanding of what the feedstocks are for fermentation, and we’re producing some biofragrance products as soon as 2026. We’ve done some nominal revenue already in 2025. The other side of this is Loricol’s oils that we talk about with gene edited crops.

And this is really thinking about how you can use crops that are currently available, like broad acre crops like soybean, to produce really interesting oils. And so that’s a sustainable ingredient side of our business. So one of the things everyone says is how does this happen? How does it work? This slide talks about the steps that are involved in what we call our Rapid Trait Development System.

Like many people in the world right today, we use in our discovery platforms computational biology. That’s bolstered by using artificial intelligence. So this is understanding what to edit. So when you have a genome that is 3,000,000,000 basis, how do you focus in to find what you’re actually going to edit? So we can make spelling changes like the little red squiggly line under your misspelled word in Microsoft Word, you right click it and bingo, you spell it correctly.

The same sort of concept is what’s happening in a genome, rewriting some of the code in the genetic backbone of seeds and crops. Our ability to go back to a single cell and do that through cell culture and then get back to a whole plant is what we do in twelve to fifteen months. To give you an understanding of the size of this market, this gives you what we’re focused on right now, is the rice trait royalty targets. This is the weed management system, we have two herbicide tolerant traits. We’re going to have single traits as well as combined traits.

So we can stack them together. And on the right hand side, you see here clearly that you get an annual trait net to SICVUS in this 30 to $50 range. And when you think about the size of the market in rice, even at 5,000,000 acres, which is relatively small, we can see a greater than $200,000,000 annual royalty to the company. As you expand out into global markets, these numbers just get huge. When you think about rice as the second biggest crop in the world, four twelve million acres around the world, we’re not going to access all of that, but 10% of that would be pretty amazing.

We’ve just signed a deal with a group called AgVyre in India, and India is 120,000,000 acres of that four twelve million. Already our Chief Science Officer will spend a week in India last week, and that’s moving very quickly. We’re excited to bring that on stream as well. So that’s the current near term revenue that I’ve been talking about and the business model around traits. I want to do a little bit more of an expansion of this in the next few minutes on the overview of the business.

As I’ve mentioned, there’s productivity traits. Seamus is all about the front end of the crop planting, being able to reduce fertiliser, reduce insecticides, the herbicides with weed management, fungicides, and better plant characteristics. These are all traits or trait categories that create value. The farmer understands that when he or she plants a crop that they have one of their biggest input costs listed in these areas of traits. So being able to reduce the need for those creates a lot of value and also creates a wonderful productivity for every acre.

A lot of you are thinking, is gene editing the same as GMO? No, it’s not. I want to say that again. Gene editing is not the same as GMO. GMO are transgenics.

They take a gene from another organism and put it into a crop plant. It’s old technology that was great in the nineties, but we’re in 2025 now. Gene editing has a much faster time to market. It’s got a favorable regulatory framework ahead of us, but it’s also scalable, so we can think about adding all those different productivity traits and stacking them together in crops. So it really is the future of breeding.

So I mentioned before that our core mission that we’re seamlessly interacting with plant breeding programs, this is how we do it, by having a faster time to market. The trait machine, this is a recapitulation of what I just mentioned about how we do it, but the idea of actually automating this process to take elite germplasm, edit it, test it and then license it within twelve to fifteen months is a game changer when it comes to plant breeding. In the past that would take ten to fifteen years, and in some cases in breeding programs as much as two to three decades. And that’s what we need right now, if we’re going to actually help every acre more be more productive. Just to say this cartoon, it is a cartoon, this is a lab with many many people working in cell culture.

So this is our pipeline of where we are, and I want to point out, Rice I’ve gone through at the top here. Ag is a show me industry, show me how it works. So show me that you can actually do the edits, can you see it in the greenhouse when you grow plants in the greenhouse, and can you see it with successful field trials. And here’s a little example in image here showing again unedited canola that when you spray herbicide it kills the canola and the weeds, and then when it’s edited, it kills the weeds but not canola. So again you have a list here of the traits and the various success we have on canola both in Edits and Greenhouse and field trials.

And right now we’re currently working to build more partnerships in canola and soybean. So what about the value of this? When you think about rice, as I’ve mentioned, you have this annual estimated fee or trait fee or royalty per acre, and it depends on what you’re replacing, whether you’re replacing a lot of herbicide or a lot of fungicide. Here you see the sclerotinia resistance in canola. We see a 10 to $15 net to CBIS royalty, and the estimated CBIS peak accessible acres is about 30,000,000 acres, so you get an annualised royalty of over 300,000,000.

It takes time to build this, no doubt. But you can see that as an independent trade developer, the royalty markets are potentially huge. And if I go back to the GMO business model that Monsanto helped develop, you think about one of their major traits which is herbicide tolerant soybean that was also in corn and cotton and some other crops, they’re still collecting $4,000,000,000 of royalty every year. That’s just one trait, one crop or a couple of crops, sorry. But they developed that in 1995, to give you an idea.

They’re still collecting $4,000,000,000 in royalty every year. So what are some of the barriers and what are the things we have to make sure are okay? Regulatory is the big one. And I’m going to go through this in a little bit of detail because it’s really important to understand why GMO didn’t take off as broadly as they had hoped in the 1990s. And one of the reasons was Europe said no to GMO.

There were some concerns about unintended consequences, that the science was problematic, But more importantly, was expensive. Was $100,000,000 to get one trade onto the market. It took ten to fifteen years. This is a map showing the favourable regulatory framework for gene editing. So this is our world now.

When I first started in this area ten, fifteen years ago, this was all red. There was no policies in place, there was no one even thinking about gene editing and understanding what you can do. If you stand still long enough now, you’ll hear gene editing talk about in human therapeutics, in animal breeding now and also in agriculture. And what’s really important is what regulatory agencies around the world have discovered and understand now is that the products of gene editing are indistinguishable from what occurs in nature, or comes out of a plant breeding programme. So that’s the seamless part.

That’s why you can seamlessly put it into the plant breeding programmes, so that again, it’s scalable and faster to market. So right now, there’s a lot of green on this map as you can tell, but I’m going to focus in on Europe, because Europe has 100,000,000 acres, greenfield acres that never had the beneficiaries of GMO traits. Now they have recognised that the benefits of gene editing will help reduce all those productivity traits, reduce fertiliser, reduce the use of fungicides and herbicides. And they’ve just passed last year in Parliament, they passed a new law that now is going through the iteration of the final text, and that takes what they call a trialogue. So the council, commission, and parliament are working through the final text of that.

And we’re excited because we’re seeing a final text, we believe, by the end of this year. It sounds like it takes a long time, it does in Europe, but that framework opens up a huge market, not just in Europe, but also globally with trade as a really important aspect of this. So in summary, what I’d like to do is just go through some of the highlights of where we are at CBIS. Think about this, we’re commercialising crop traits as a global commercialisation. This is we’re launching herbicide tolerant traits in Latin America and The US in 2728, building that huge opportunity of royalties.

We’re also looking at bio fragrances, as I mentioned in 2020, a little nominal in 2025, but then building 2026 to 2027. We see a harmonising global regulatory, and that’s a really key issue. We’re building great platforms with our trait machine that’s scalable and time bound, and that is that twelve to fifteen months. And then the other side of this is with a number of other crop specific breeding programs, we’ve got a really great opportunity to build out our pipeline. So with that, I’d like to thank you for your attention.

Like I said, starting out at the end of a busy couple of days, so I appreciate that and love to take questions. Yep. Correct. And it’s a great question because plants have the ability to do amazing things. When you all of us in this room, we’re all 99.9 the same genetically.

We have different phenotypes, but we’re genetically very similar. Plants go from small flowering plants to 300 foot tall trees. We understand some of the differences on that at a genome level. And so when we make an edit, we know what the outcome is going to be and we can follow it really closely. So it’s essentially what happens in every plant breeding programme.

They select a tall plant because they think it might yield more, that’s full of some mutations that’s happened naturally. So you don’t have that unexpected outcome. Such a great question. I’ve dedicated a big chunk of my life to that role. I’ve spent a lot of time in Europe talking to regulatory agencies and explaining what we do.

I think I do it all around the world. I’ve gone to a lot of different countries to help them devise policies to understand what the process we actually go through and what the outcome is. To your both questions. And I think that the key thing is benefits. So with a lot of GMO technology, no one ever saw a benefit.

No one went to the supermarket to buy a tomato because they thought that they were going to have better brain health or that they were going to live an extra ten to fifteen years. Farmers benefit. And so I think what they’re recognising that farms are really influenced by climate change in a big way right now. And so having a more productive acre with better are the benefits that people are seeing, and so they want to see that come to market. So there’s a real particularly in the industry, we’re spending time now explaining to people why it’s just the same as plant breeding.

And it’s something that we’ve been doing for thousands of years. So would that mean most likely as the products Yes, labeling is a great question because I think one of the things about there’s two sides to that coin. Sometimes you want to make it that it’s really different, and how cool is this? This is gene edited, like I want to buy this. Having said that, when you’re dealing with commodities, labeling can be time consuming and costly.

So we don’t see labeling as an issue because it’s going to come straight through a plant breeding program. Otherwise you’re going have to end up labeling everything that comes out of plant breeding. So unless there is a huge benefit that’s a vertically integrated system, then I say that we most likely won’t have Lightning. So a really good question. They’re asking about whether, like Monsanto, there’s sterile seeds.

So what’s interesting about the seed business right now is it’s grown a lot since the 1990s. And most farmers know that buying quality seed every year is really valuable because it improves their yield. A lot of seeds now come pretreated, so they put a seed treatment around it, so like a fungicide around the seed. So it’s more complex than thinking you’re going to farmers are going to save seed. What they’ve discovered is most farmers buy seed every year.

In some cases they won’t. And there are mechanisms to collect royalties at the end of the season as well as the start of the season. So we see our business model going fairly well. And I’ve been told to stop. With a stop sign.

Thank you. Thank you. Good question.

This article was generated with the support of AI and reviewed by an editor. For more information see our T&C.