San Diego startup is hacking plant DNA to end farming’s chemical dependence

Nestled in the Sorrento Mesa brush, a greenhouse is filled with genetically resilient rice.

Peter Beetham, CEO of Cibus, walked through the lush grass and, in his Australian accent, recounted the first time he successfully altered plant DNA.

“I couldn’t believe it,” he said. In the lab, he repeated his experiment dozens of times before his breakthrough — Beetham was able to hack into a tobacco’s gene-editing instructions and made the plant more resistant to herbicides.

When Beetham first published this technology in 1999, the field was dominated by genetically modified organisms — an approach that inserts foreign genetic material into a host’s DNA. Beetham’s method directs a plant’s own DNA repair system to make a targeted changes that exist organically in nature.

Cibus, founded in 2001 to commercialize this platform, was an early mover in what would become the precision crop biotechnology revolution.

That cold night at Cornell University 28 years ago would be the impetus for his $120 million company.

The company is called Cibus — Latin for nourishment — and it recently announced that it would begin deploying genetically engineered rice to countries in Latin America, aiming to finally profit from the science that took the San Diego team almost two decades to develop.

It took a long time to bring their science to market because, while developing the technology, the novel method had no comparison. Cibus scientists were changing genetic building blocks, and the outcome was indistinguishable from what exists in nature.

Unlike CRISPR — which deletes sections of DNA and often causes cascading effects — Cibus’s proprietary rapid trait development system, or RTDS, takes advantage of a naturally occurring genetic reaction in the body to change DNA to correspond to a more favorable trait.

It works like this:

Your DNA breaks thousands of times a day, then fixes itself in accordance with its cellular instructions. This San Diego company is hacking those DNA directions in plants — genetically engineering crops to carry more favorable traits.

And as that cell grows from a seedling to a stalk, it will carry more resilient DNA.

Cibus has edited canola and rice DNA to be herbicide-tolerant and disease-resistant.

“When you plant a crop, you spray a lot of herbicide to control weeds,” said Beetham. “Everyone does. So people often say, ‘Not all farmers buy herbicides.’ Well, even organic farming uses a different type of herbicides.”

He listed several long words that end in “icide,” which farmers use to dose plants, hoping for a healthy harvest.

Using Cibus seeds, farmers could save money and use fewer chemicals while growing healthier crops, said Beetham.

The science inside the San Diego greenhouse is impressive — but it took a lot of money to get there.

As of the end of 2025, Cibus carried a deficit of $858 million — the compounded cost of more than a decade of foundational research with no major commercial product on the market.

“Cibus has incurred significant losses and anticipates that it will continue to incur significant losses for several years,” the company said in SEC filings.

This financial turmoil is the status quo for many R&D companies, but Cibus is particularly short on money and time.

“If ongoing or future field trials are unsuccessful, Cibus may be unable to complete the development of productivity trait candidates on a timely basis or at all,” the filings note.

There have been significant steps taken to reduce losses. Net losses dropped 53% from 2024 to 2025, in large part because the company reduced R&D expenses.

In December, Cibus warned investors about its debts in SEC filings, noting that if the company doesn’t raise more money in the next few months, it might not survive.

The following month, Cibus raised $22.3 million. This funding would “extend its runway to roughly mid-2027,” Beetham said.

To buy time, Cibus has made an unexpected detour into fragrances.

Using the same gene-editing platform it applies to rice and canola, the company has engineered yeast strains that produce rose and peach scent compounds for “a major consumer goods partner,” though he didn’t say which one.

Cibus expects to generate real revenue starting in the second half of this year through this venture.

While the company is rolling out fragrances, it will continue working to deploy genetically modified crops to the field.

Herbicide-tolerant rice varieties are slated to launch with seed company partners in Colombia and Ecuador around 2027, with Peru and broader regional expansion to follow.

The company is still awaiting regulatory approval in the U.S. and Canada.

Cibus will begin making money when farmers start saving money using Cibus seeds.

In theory, Beetham explains, farmers will save money on herbicide. That saving gets split roughly three ways among Cibus, the seed company and the farmer, and Cibus collects $20 to $30 per acre in royalties.

At scale, it’s a compelling model. Getting to scale is the hard part.

There are countless things that need to go right in field testing, and even if you account for them all, the unpredictable occurs.

During one costly Canadian field trial, a farmer thought he’d found a clever workaround for watering the crops: banking snowmelt to sustain his crops through the season. It worked exactly as planned, right up until the geese showed up. Drawn to the newly formed pond, they ate every last one of the genetically engineered plants before Cibus could run the required tests.

“That was the downside of one of our best intentions,” said Noel Sauer, senior vice president of research at Cibus.

The royalty model only pays out once edited seeds are in farmers’ hands.

“There’s a hesitancy among farmers and in agriculture. It’s the ‘show me’ industry. Show me it works. I want to see it in my field. I want to see that it controls the weeds,” Beetham said. “That’s great, because we know this product works.”

Cibus scientists test their engineered traits across generations of seeds, guaranteeing that they carry more resilient characteristics that will save farmers money down the line.

“The science will outlive me,” Beetham said. “I feel like a chaperone. And that’s why I am making sure we do the highest quality deployment.”