Elo Life Systems Appoints Michele Fite as Chief Commercial Officer and Paul Boyer as Chief Financial Officer

 

New Leadership Brings Industry Experience to the Next-Generation Ingredient Company

DURHAM, N.C., August 30, 2022 — Elo Life Systems (Elo), the next-generation ingredient company, announced today the appointment of Michele Fite as Chief Commercial Officer and Paul Boyer as Chief Financial Officer. “At Elo, we are empowering the future of food,” said Todd Rands, CEO at Elo. “The addition of Paul and Michele to our management team adds significant new momentum as we build our commercial business and accelerate future investments to bring our novel foods and ingredients to the market.”

Elo unlocks nature’s abilities to make consumers’ favorite foods more delicious, healthy, and planet-friendly. With their proprietary CULTIVATE platform, Elo scans the biodiversity present in native plants and identifies novel features that can be harnessed to improve the nutritional content and taste of food consumers enjoy most, while reducing their impact on the environment.

michele fiteAs Elo launches new, innovative ingredients from its R&D pipeline, Chief Commercial Officer Michele Fite will build the commercial organization and lead the execution of Elo’s business model. With over 20 years of experience in the food tech and nutrition industries, Fite is uniquely positioned to drive Elo’s long-term business and marketing strategies and deliver commercial success.

Before joining Elo, Fite was the Chief Commercial Officer at Motif FoodWorks Inc. As one of its first employees, Fite led Motif’s business and commercial strategies. The company successfully launched within 3 years of Motif introducing two game-changing technologies in the plant-based meat alternatives space.

“Elo is taking a unique approach to food innovation,” Fite said, “and I’m excited to lead its commercial efforts. This is going to be an incredible journey, and I look forward to helping execute on our mission of bringing healthy, delicious food to everybody.”

paul boyerAs Elo’s new Chief Financial Officer, Paul Boyer brings over 25 years of experience scaling companies from early-stage through over $1B in revenue as a CFO and COO in venture-backed, private equity, and public companies. Paul has extensive IPO and M&A experience and has raised ~$1B in equity/debt.

“I’m honored to be on a team seeking to accelerate the future of sustainable and healthy food,” said Paul Boyer, Chief Financial Officer at Elo Life Systems. “I’m eager to put my experience to work with a company that is creating real change in people’s lives and making the foods we enjoy healthier.”

With its proprietary CULTIVATE platform for rapid target discovery and expedited product development utilizing diverse species of fruits and vegetables, and a growing team focused on manufacturing, scale-up, and commercialization of its novel ingredients, Elo Life Sciences is poised to deliver on its mission — creating healthier, tastier, and more sustainable foods.

The company’s first product to market is a plant-based sweetener that replicates the experience of sugar without the calories or negative health impacts. Inspired by monk fruit, Elo’s sweetener also reduces the environmental impact in resulting products by enabling local production in other common fruits and vegetables. This new plant-based sweetener will have applications in thousands of everyday foods, and eliminate excess added sugars and calories in foods that consumers love. The result is sustainable and healthy foods that consumers love.

To learn more about Elo Life Sciences, please visit: https://elolife.com.

ABOUT ELO LIFE SYSTEMS

Elo is the next-generation ingredient company. We unlock nature’s abilities to make your favorite foods more delicious, healthy, and planet-friendly.

We focus on ingredients that empower consumers to feel good about the food they eat. From plant-based sweeteners, proteins, flavors, and more, our ingredients make food tastier and healthier, while requiring less from the planet.

Elo’s innovations are targeted squarely at the classic foods that everyday consumers love. We believe consumers shouldn’t have to sacrifice their preferences or make major changes to their diet to feel good about the food they eat. With this in mind, Elo is making their favorite foods healthier and more sustainable. We give people more options, without losing any of the flavor or experience that makes these foods so craveable.

Elo Life Systems is based in Research Triangle Park. To learn more or discuss opportunities to partner and design foods with our novel ingredients, visit: https://elolife.com.

Elo. Empowering the future of food.

Elo Life Systems Appoints Experienced Ag and Lifesciences Executive, Todd Rands, as New Chief Executive Officer

DURHAM, N.C.–(BUSINESS WIRE)–Elo Life Systems, a company that is empowering the future of sustainable and healthy food, announced that Todd Rands has been appointed as its new Chief Executive Officer. Rands is a seasoned agriculture and life sciences industry executive with over 25 years of combined business, legal, and scientific experience, driving development of new technologies and innovative commercial solutions at Fortune 500 companies and venture-backed start-ups.

todd rands“Todd brings decades of experience across the food, agriculture, and biotechnology industries,” said Elo’s Chairman and lead investor at AccelR8, Justin Kern. “He is uniquely positioned to lead Elo as it accelerates commercial product development and solidifies commercial partnerships to deliver the company’s products to market.”

A leading innovator in plant-based solutions, Elo deploys proprietary algorithms to gain deeper insights across native genomes, genes and traits to identify natural targets that can improve human nutrition and health, while requiring less from our planet.

With a product-ready genome editing platform, world-class expertise in target discovery, and an end-to-end infrastructure that enables expedited trait validation, the company is creating novel plant-based products that empower the future of healthy foods.

“Elo is solving the most critical problems of our time, by creating plant-based products that improve human health and bolster the resiliency of our food against the changing climate,” remarked Todd. “Innovation with healthy and sustainable food is desperately needed. And our collective future depends on companies like Elo creating new solutions that do not exist today,” said Todd. “I am thrilled to join Elo’s incredibly talented team as we strive to better our society and succeed in this high-impact mission.”

Elo’s first product, currently advancing into field trials, is a natural plant-based sweetener that provides consumers with all the sweetness of sugar, without the calories. In addition, Elo is developing a variety of banana that is resistant to the devastating Banana Fusarium wilt disease that is destroying the entire global production of this important crop.

By working with its commercial partners, Elo is catalyzing the adoption of its innovative, healthy and sustainable products into the global food, beverage and ingredient industries.

Dole Partners with Elo Life Systems to Save the Banana

Article originally published by: NC BioTech

—

“Yes! We Have No Bananas” was a chart-topping song hummed and sung across America after it was first recorded in 1923.

But what if there really were no bananas?

It could happen. Maybe we’ll sing the blues version in 2023.

Fusarium wilt – also called Panama disease – was discovered in Colombia last year. It will likely spread throughout the rest of Latin America, jeopardizing the Cavendish banana we’re accustomed to buying at our local grocery stores.

-- Shutterstock

Fusarium wilt is caused by the Tropical Race 4 (TR4) strain of Fusarium fungus. It’s an effective plant killer that now threatens the region that supplies almost all the bananas sold commercially in the U.S. and Europe.

The same disease has decimated banana plantations in Southeast Asia for three decades. It lives in the soil and attacks plants through their roots, starving them of the nutrients they need to survive.

Now the good news. Research Triangle Park-based food and agriculture company Elo Life Systems is working with the Dole Food Company to keep the banana coming to grocery stores around the country. The two businesses just  announced a five-year strategic partnership to develop Fusarium-resistant banana varieties, including the Cavendish.

Dole is one of the world’s top three suppliers of bananas, along with Chiquita and Del Monte. They all rely on the Cavendish to stock produce shelves from North Carolina to California and beyond. Without serious intervention, Fusarium could stop the supply chain in its tracks.

The race to defeat the banana pandemic

“The spread of Fusarium wilt would be devastating to the $25 billion banana industry. And it would significantly impact growers whose livelihoods depend on exports of the Cavendish banana,” said Fayaz Khazi, Ph.D., Elo’s CEO.

Fayaz Khazi

It’s also an environmental threat because farmers are abandoning Fusarium-contaminated fields and clearing new ground to plant bananas, often spreading fungus-laden soil from one location to the next. “This collaboration with Dole is an important part of our strategy to improve the security and sustainability of the global food supply,” Khazi noted.

Patricio Gutiérrez, Dole’s director of Innovation R&D, added that “bananas are not only the most popular fruit in the United States but, together with plantains, are a staple food on which much of the world depends for sustenance. Our investment…reflects our aspiration to improve a critically important food crop, while helping farmers meet the continuous challenges to produce this food for the planet.”

If you question the possible demise of the Cavendish banana, you shouldn’t. Until the 1950s, the most commonly exported banana variety was the Gros Michel. It was sweeter and had a thicker skin that made it easier to ship without bruising. The Gros Michel was almost wiped out by a different strain of the Fusarium fungus.

The Cavendish, which was resistant to the earlier type of Fusarium, took its place. Now that variety, grown almost entirely in Central and South America, is at risk. It makes up about 99% of the banana export market.

Khazi said Elo wants to find a long-term, sustainable solution that will save the fruit. “It’s critically important to develop Fusarium-resistant varieties by leveraging the natural resistance to TR4 in several relatives of Cavendish,” he explained. Elo hopes to have the research in place to achieve that goal within the next three years.

Bananas in research at Elo lab

Traditional plant breeding is a painstaking process that can take a couple of decades. Since commercial bananas don’t produce seeds, the process is far more complex and time consuming than with other crops. “Time is of the essence,” Khazi said. “Our technology platform allows us to rapidly take advantage of the resistance that already exists in nature and quickly bring that into commercial banana varieties.”

The first challenge is to identify the problem and see how nature is dealing with it. Comparative genomics and computational biology allow Elo to look at  the biologic makeup of an assortment of banana varieties. And it can match DNA sequences to find the variations that make the Cavendish more susceptible to the soil-borne fungus.

The next step is to improve the genetics of the banana through precision biotechnology. Elo uses its proprietary gene editing technology – a homing endonuclease-based platform found naturally in primitive plants and algae – to precisely cut out faulty DNA or insert new genetic material.

This process produces an identical outcome to traditional breeding – a plant that is resistant to the Fusarium fungus. But it’s much faster.

Elo Life Systems photo

Under the terms of its agreement with Dole, Elo will research and develop multiple ways to tackle Fusarium wilt resistance. That includes making the Cavendish less likely to attract the fungus, as well as developing other resistant varieties of bananas.

Dole will fund the R&D and be responsible for field evaluation and commercialization. It will pay Elo royalties on the commercialized plant products.

The companies will have to overcome the reluctance of some consumers and regulators – primarily in Europe – to accept gene-edited food, even though gene editing is not traditional GMO technology. It simply speeds up what plant breeders have done for generations – finding the right combination of DNA sequences to allow desired traits to flourish while undesirable traits diminish.

“We are a company that accelerates plant breeding,” Khazi explained. “Traditional breeding takes a lot of time and effort. With our technology, which includes our ARCUS genome-editing platform, we can compress crop improvement into a short timeframe. We use our knowledge and science to do what nature does, but much faster.”

Improving human wellness through food

The partnership with Dole is just Elo’s latest foray into improving food. The company has been steadily working on a variety of other projects that run the gamut from cutting saturated fat in canola to increasing the amount of sclareol in clary sage.

Elo plant researchers confer in lab.

Two years ago, the company announced an ongoing strategic partnership with global food conglomerate Cargill to reduce the saturated fat in canola oil. The product is preferred by fast-food restaurants and large food and ingredient companies.

The goal is to reduce saturated fat levels from 8% to less than 2.5% by editing the genome of canola plants. Elo hopes lower saturate levels in the frying oil will, over the long term, improve cardiovascular health.

Elo also has launched a subsidiary in Brisbane, Australia, to help farmers make their crops more resilient to climate change. The current focus is on using gene-editing technology to create drought-tolerant and disease-resistant chickpeas with improved levels of beneficial proteins.

This is particularly important in Australia, where a five-year drought has caused many farmers to stop growing the crop. Plant-based proteins like chickpeas are essential to the world’s food and nutritional security.

Natural zero-calorie sweeteners is another focus area. Elo is looking for reliable alternatives to those calorie-rich sweeteners that can increase obesity and metabolic disorders. The company is working with partners in the food and beverage industry to develop a watermelon-based product – branded as ZeroMelon – that might revolutionize the sweetener market.

On a more local front, Elo is collaborating with Avoca to improve the sclareol content of clary sage plants. Avoca is a subsidiary of specialty chemicals company Ashland. Its Merry Hill location in eastern North Carolina is one of the few places in the country where clary sage is grown.

Sclareol is a binding agent used in all kinds of fragrances, from luxury perfumes to everyday detergents, to make their scents last longer. It’s used as a sustainable substitute for a waxy substance called ambergris that is secreted by a small percentage of sperm whales.

Elo also has close working relationships with North Carolina State University and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Its parent company Precision BioSciences – which focuses on human therapeutics – was a Duke University spin-off.

Looking to the future

Khazi said Elo has made steady progress by directing its food-based technology at complex challenges in food and agriculture. He expects the company to be equally as productive over the next few years, with a slightly different focus.

Elo Life Systems scientists at work.

“We’re evolving as a solutions company, rather than targeting a single technology,” he said. “Elo already is known as a product-ready genome editing company. With our suite of technologies, we are even better positioned to solve problems and explore opportunities in the food sector.”

The company’s 21 employees specialize in four areas:

  • data science;
  • technology development, including genome editing and molecular biology;
  • translational agriculture – working with client companies on new products and product profiles; and
  • controlled environmental agriculture –validating product concepts through plants grown in greenhouses or growth chambers.

“We have a tremendously diverse, talented, and well-trained team,” Khazi pointed out. “Elo’s success is a direct result of their resilience and hard work.”  He said most of the company’s employees have advanced degrees. Many were hired from the Research Triangle area.

“We view our role as connecting the dots between what we eat and how we live,” he explained. “As people live longer, we also need to focus on living healthier.

“Average consumers know what’s good for them. But is the food sector ready? There will be a need for a technology company like ours to cater to this unmet need – to improve not only the quantity, but also the quality of the food supply. That’s where Elo fits into the equation.”

Elo Life Systems Announces Strategic Partnership with Dole Food Company with the Goal of Saving the Cavendish Banana

bananas

DURHAM, N.C.- August 4, 2020 – Elo Life Systems, a food and agriculture company with a mission to improve human health and wellness, today announced a strategic partnership with the Dole Food Company, one of the world’s largest producers of high-quality fresh fruit and vegetables, aiming to develop multiple banana varieties, including Cavendish, with resistance to the devastating fungal disease, Fusarium Wilt.

Fusarium wilt, caused by the Tropical Race 4 (TR4) strain of a plant pathogenic fungus called Fusarium, is a fast-spreading pandemic threatening the continued cultivation of the world’s most popular fruit in a $25 billion banana industry. The disease was detected in Colombia in August 2019 and is expected to spread throughout Latin America.

“Spread of Fusarium wilt would not only have devastating consequences to the banana industry, but also have a significant economic impact on farmers in the affected regions whose livelihoods depend on exports of the Cavendish banana,” said Elo’s Chief Executive Officer, Fayaz Khazi, Ph.D. “To date, chemical and cultural approaches to control this disease have been unsuccessful. We’re excited to work with Dole, which shares Elo’s vision to improve the security and sustainability of the global food supply, to address this critical need and help develop new varieties that leverage natural resistance within several relatives of the Cavendish banana.”

“Bananas are not only the most popular fruit in the United States, but together with plantains, they are a staple food on which much of the world depends for sustenance,” said Patricio Gutiérrez, Director of Innovation R&D, Dole Tropical Products. “Our investment in this strategic project reflects our aspiration to improve a critically important food crop while helping farmers meet the continuous challenges to produce this food for the planet.”

Under the terms of the partnership agreement, Elo will be primarily responsible for the discovery, evaluation, and development of multiple approaches to achieve resistance to Fusarium wilt, and Dole will be responsible for field evaluation and commercialization of Fusarium TR4 resistant Cavendish varieties. Dole will fully fund the research and development at Elo, in addition to paying royalties on the commercialized plant product.

As part of the collaborative effort, Elo will use its proprietary suite of tools, including cutting-edge knowledge mining platform, gene discovery pipeline, trait validation workflows, and end-to-end expertise in translational agriculture, in combination with its proprietary homing endonuclease-based genome editing platform to develop potential TR4-resistant banana varieties in this important clonally propagated crop.

Banana Infographic

About Elo Life Systems, Inc.

Elo’s mission is to create novel products that enhance the nutrition and diversity of the global food supply. To address agricultural needs, Elo partners with stakeholders in the food systems value chain to bridge gaps and meet needs across agricultural productivity, nutritional demand, food security, climate-resilience, and human wellness. Elo Life Systems, Inc. is a wholly owned subsidiary of Precision BioSciences, Inc. (NASDAQ: DTIL). To learn more about Elo Life Systems please visit www.elolife.ag.
Forward Looking Statements

This press release contains forward-looking statements within the meaning of the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995. All statements contained in this press release that do not relate to matters of historical fact should be considered forward-looking statements, including, without limitation, statements regarding the ability to develop TR4-resistant banana varieties. In some cases, you can identify forward-looking statements by terms such as “anticipate,” “believe,” “could,” “expect,” “should,” “plan,” “intend,” “estimate,” “target,” “mission,” “may,” “will,” “would,” “should,” “could,” “target,” “project,” “predict,” “contemplate,” “potential,” or the negative thereof and similar words and expressions.

Forward-looking statements are based on management’s current expectations, beliefs and assumptions and on information currently available to us. Such statements are subject to a number of known and unknown risks, uncertainties and assumptions, and actual results may differ materially from those expressed or implied in the forward-looking statements due to various important factors, including, but not limited to: our ability to become profitable; our ability to procure sufficient funding and requirements under our current debt instruments; and effects of restrictions thereunder; risks associated with raising additional capital; our operating expenses and our ability to predict what those expenses will be; our limited operating history; the success of our programs and product candidates in which we expend our resources; our dependence on our ARCUS technology; the initiation, cost, timing, progress, achievement of milestones and results of research and development activities, preclinical or greenhouse studies and clinical or field trials; public perception about genome editing technology and its applications; competition in the genome editing, biopharmaceutical, biotechnology and agricultural biotechnology fields; our or our collaborators’ ability to identify, develop and commercialize product candidates; pending and potential liability lawsuits and penalties against us or our collaborators related to our technology and our product candidates; the U.S. and foreign regulatory landscape applicable to our and our collaborators’ development of product candidates; our or our collaborators’ ability to obtain and maintain regulatory approval of our product candidates, and any related restrictions, limitations and/or warnings in the label of an approved product candidate; our or our collaborators’ ability to advance product candidates into, and successfully design, implement and complete, clinical or field trials; potential manufacturing problems associated with the development or commercialization of any of our product candidates; our ability to achieve our anticipated operating efficiencies at our manufacturing facility; delays or difficulties in our and our collaborators’ ability to enroll patients; changes in interim “top-line” and initial data that we announce or publish; if our product candidates do not work as intended or cause undesirable side effects; risks associated with applicable healthcare, data protection, privacy and security regulations and our compliance therewith; the rate and degree of market acceptance of any of our product candidates; the success of our existing collaboration agreements, and our ability to enter into new collaboration arrangements; our current and future relationships with and reliance on third parties including suppliers and manufacturers; our ability to obtain and maintain intellectual property protection for our technology and any of our product candidates; potential litigation relating to infringement or misappropriation of intellectual property rights; our ability to effectively manage the growth of our operations; our ability to attract, retain, and motivate key scientific and management personnel; market and economic conditions; effects of system failures and security breaches, effects of natural and manmade disasters, public health emergencies and other natural catastrophic events effects of the outbreak of COVID-19, or any pandemic, epidemic or outbreak of an infectious disease; insurance expenses and exposure to uninsured liabilities; and other important factors discussed under the caption “Risk Factors” in Precision’ Biosciences, Inc.’s Quarterly Report on Form 10-Q for the quarterly period ended March 31, 2020, as any such factors may be updated from time to time in Precision BioSciences, Inc.’s other filings with the SEC, which are accessible on the SEC’s website at www.sec.gov and the Investors & Media page of Precision BioSciences, Inc.’s website at investor.precisionbiosciences.com.

All forward-looking statements speak only as of the date of this press release and, except as required by applicable law, we do not plan to publicly update or revise any forward-looking statements contained herein, whether as a result of any new information, future events, changed circumstances or otherwise.

Precision PlantSciences renamed Elo Life Systems

DURHAM, North Carolina, USA, June 04 2018 – Precision BioSciences has announced a new name and brand identity for its food and agriculture business. The new entity, Elo Life Systems, will be held as a wholly-owned subsidiary of Precision BioSciences, a Durham-based genome editing company dedicated to improving life. The announcement of Elo Life Systems further solidifies Precision’s commitment to improving human life and to bridging the gap between agriculture and human health.

Elo Life Systems is expected to add several differentiating technologies to its portfolio to complement its flagship genome editing platform optimized for applications in crop improvement, animal genetics, industrial biotechnology, and sustainable agriculture.

“Elo’s technology portfolio will serve as the foundation for discovery pipelines that leverage a multiscale biology approach to gain deeper functional insights and to rapidly translate such insights into actionable, product-worthy ideas. The Elo team is proud of its legacy and excited about this opportunity to shape the foods of tomorrow,” said Fayaz Khazi, Chief Executive Officer of Elo Life Systems.

Elo has ongoing partnerships with several seed and food product companies including a recently announced strategic partnership with Cargill, Inc.

“We are dedicated to improving life. Through Elo Life Systems, we continue to deliver on our mission to improve human health and wellness,” said Matt Kane, Chief Executive Officer of Precision BioSciences. “Our product-ready technology platforms, a creative team, and a partnership-friendly business model are already making an impact on the next-generation of foods.”

About Precision BioSciences

Precision BioSciences is a biotechnology company dedicated to improving life. Our mission is to cure genetic diseases, overcome cancer, and feed the planet through innovative scientific solutions and with a focus on genome editing. ARCUS®, Precision’s unique, therapeutic-grade genome editing system, combines the specificity and efficacy required to translate the promise of gene editing into life changing gene therapies, cell therapies, and agricultural products.