One-line solution summary.
Uniphage is a building new era of safe and efficient crop antimicrobials created using the combined power of deep learning and safe viruses
Elevator pitch
What is your solution?
Uniphage is developing the first-ever safe, efficient, ultra-targeted (and even organic) antifungal and antibacterial drugs for plants. We use cutting-edge AI to select safe bacterial and fungal viruses to eliminate target pathogens using only the pathogens' genomic information. Uniphage has built a deep-learning-powered platform technology to predict 100X faster than previously possible bacterial viral-host interactions and identified safe viruses against a range of bacterial targets. The main advantage of our approach is that it's ultra-precise (kills only the target pathogen and no off-target microbes), efficient (1/3 of all crops continue being lost annually, and we aim to bring this number to less than 5%), safe, and organic. The first target of our technology is citrus greening, a completely incurable disease that causes the US more than 2B+ to mitigate annually. Citrus growers in the US try to contain the disease spread and limit its impact on yield, unfortunately mostly ineffectively. Overall, we're bringing about the new age of plant antimicrobials that are truly safe and effective.
What specific problem are you trying to solve?
Bacterial and fungal pathogens kill more than one-third of all crops worldwide, causing an annual loss of >$500B. Meanwhile, more than 25,000 people, including 10,000 children, die every single day from hunger. We aim to end world hunger by curing bacterial and fungal diseases in crop plants. There are in total >20,000 known pathogenic fungi and bacteria infecting crops. This remains a major problem because current solutions are not only toxic to humans and the environment, just think about widely used Monsanto products and related human cancer cases - but also largely ineffective - which is clear from how much crops are still lost to diseases. All while there have been no significant innovations in the treatment of fungal and bacterial diseases in agriculture in the past decades. We aim to change it and produce biology-inspired and safe next-gen pesticides, with our first target being citrus greening - America's most devastating bacterial disease in agriculture.
Who does your solution serve? In what ways will the solution impact their lives?
I. Long-term, our solution will impact crop producers in the US and abroad, many of whom are located in rural areas and have small and medium-sized businesses. We're targeting multiple SDGs, inc. SGD 3: Good Health and Well-Being, (SGD 13) Climate Action, (SGD 9) Industry, Innovation, and Infrastructure, and
SDG 2 - While 25-40% of crops are lost to pathogens, 7-12% are lost to bacterial pathogens and >20-27% to fungal ones. By producing affordable antibacterial solutions, Uniphage will reduce the burden of infectious diseases in agriculture by several %. Moreover, each farmer using Uniphage’s products will reduce their bacterial and fungal disease burden by >70%.
SGD 12 and 15: Antibiotics and pesticides, widely used for food disease control, are toxic and dangerous for humans, animals, and the environment. By increasing our safe solution’s availability, we contribute to the increasingly responsible production of agricultural and livestock products, thus making life on land safer and more sustainable.
II. The first solution that we will bring to the market is against citrus greening, an incurable and devastating disease that causes the US more than 2B in damages annually. Our primary customers are citrus growers in FL and CA (US HLB mitigation market = >450M. #US citrus growing businesses = 11,500, most of which are medium and large size growers.) This disease has been around since 2005 and is completely incurable, which makes many citrus growers operate at a loss for years now.
What steps have you taken to understand the needs of the population you want to serve?
We specifically validated the citrus greening market during NSF I-Corps in July 2020 and have continued extensively engaging with the citrus community ever since. They have provided us with a support letter for NSF SBIR for which we're waiting to hear back. We're also actively talking and are close to a range of bacteriophage, agricultural, and other biotech companies - all of whom we expect to become our potential partners.
Which aspects of the Challenge does your solution most closely address?
Other: Addressing an unmet social, environmental, or economic need not covered in the four dimensions above
What is the unmet need that your solution tried to address? Why is it important?
It falls between (2) Improving financial and economic opportunities for all (Economic Prosperity), (3) Improving healthcare access and health outcomes; and reducing and ultimately eliminating health disparities (Health), and (4) Taking action to combat climate change and its impacts (Sustainability).
We aim to significantly improve the environment, reduce the effects of global warming in terms of it significantly deteriorating the state of infectious diseases in agriculture, and bring economic prosperity to farmer populations by curing infectious diseases in agriculture in a safe, sustainable, and affordable manner with our platform technology that is increasingly scalable.
Our solution's stage of development:
Prototype: A venture or organization building and testing its product, service, or business modelExplain why you selected this stage of development for your solution—in other words, what have you accomplished to date?
Part of Halcyon Fellowship, MassChallenge US Accelerator, MassChallenge+IBM AI Program, MassChallenge + AirForce, Panacea Stars Accelerator at Oxford U, National U of Singapore Incubator, iGEM Accelerator, I-CORPS, etc. Received ~$100k in non-dilutive funding and ~$150K in cloud credits.
R&D: (1) we have identified phage viral candidates against citrus greening (our first target) and several other bacterial diseases (2) Built the largest published genomic language model (NLP-based model to understand genomes); amounts to >100GM of training data (3) Built a proprietary pipeline to extract significantly more phage-host interaction data from publicly available sources than previously possible
Partnerships: (1) Long-term R&D partnership with the largest North American phage bank (IP is ours) (2) Research partnership with a leading North American bacteriophage CRO (3) Top-notch advisory board (4) received LOI’s from other companies to use our tech
Where our solution team is headquartered or located:
Washington D.C., DC, USATeam Lead:
Sofia Sigal-Passeck
Which of the following categories best describes your solution?
A new technologyDescribe the core technology that powers your solution.
Uniphage uses state-of-the-art natural language processing techniques to predict and engineer viral-host interactions, starting with bacteriophage-bacterial ones. Uniphage has significantly increased the available datasets by improving and scaling up a computational technique to predict bacteriophage-bacterial interactions from openly available data sources (proprietary). Our current dataset includes about 250,000 complete bacteriophage genomes and about 25,000 complete bacterial genomes. This amounts to over 100GB of data, which is on par with large language corpora used to train state-of-the-art language models. Our first PoC model has already significantly surpassed all prior approaches in both raw performance (as measured by accuracy and precision; over 97% and 95% respectively), as well as its ability to generalize to new bacterial hosts. Currently, our new platform is based on even more advanced Transformer-based genomic language models, which will not only allow for the prediction of strain-level phage-host interactions but will also form a foundation for a variety of other applications, ranging from engineering interactions between eukaryotic organisms and their viruses to engineering existing viruses to exhibit new properties to engineering viruses de novo, for applications ranging from targeting specific cancer cells with de-novo viruses to targeting senescent cells. This research will first be further re-purposed to similarly use safe fungal viruses to combat fungal diseases in crops with the major milestone being predicting which safe bacterial and fungal viruses will truly work in-field as opposed to just lab settings.
Please select the technologies currently used in your solution:
In which countries do you currently operate?
How many people does your solution currently serve, and how many do you plan to serve in the next year? If you haven’t yet launched your solution, tell us how many people you plan to serve in the next year.
We need to get the EPA approval for our solutions, the first of which we expect to get by 2024 to be allowed to legally sell it in the US. Only EPA approval is required, and we are regulated as pesticides. For testing on under 10 acres, no approval is required.
What are your impact goals for the next year, and how will you achieve them?
I. We will not be able to sell our solution this year. Our major milestones to get there and impact a large number of people of gaining the approval include: 1. Extensively test in-vitro and in-field our very first antimicrobial solution (against citrus greening) 2. Secure the first major partnership to bring this solution to the market 3. Significantly improve our platform technology to accelerate antimicrobial development by up to 100X through extensive data collection 4. Close the seed round
II. Long-term, our solution will impact crop producers in the US and abroad, many of whom are located in rural areas and have small and medium-sized businesses. We're targeting multiple SDGs, inc. SGD 3: Good Health and Well-Being, (SGD 13) Climate Action, (SGD 9) Industry, Innovation, and Infrastructure, and
SDG 2 - While 25-40% of crops are lost to pathogens, 7-12% are lost to bacterial pathogens and >20-27% to fungal ones. By producing affordable antibacterial solutions, Uniphage will reduce the burden of infectious diseases in agriculture by several %. Moreover, each farmer using Uniphage’s products will reduce their bacterial and fungal disease burden by >70%.
SGD 12 and 15: Antibiotics and pesticides, widely used for food disease control, are toxic and dangerous for humans, animals, and the environment. By increasing our safe solution’s availability, we contribute to the increasingly responsible production of agricultural and livestock products, thus making life on land safer and more sustainable.
How are you measuring your progress or planning to measure your progress toward your impact goals?
Our current KPI's are R&D-focused, i.e, measuring model's performance by performing lab-based testing of whether the predicted phages infect the bacteria of interest. Our post-regulatory-approval KPI's will focus on #customers that benefit from our solutions #revenue to re-invest in future R&D #solutions on the market and more.
What barriers currently exist for you to accomplish your goals in the next year?
1. Regulations :)
2. R&D risks involved
3. We need more connections with agricultural players and rural populations, inc. indigenous growers
How many people work on your solution team?
2
How long have you been working on your solution?
21 months
How are you and your team well-positioned to deliver this solution?
Cannot insert the full link bc the form deletes it, but it is the best outline of our team, also presented in video responses: youtu.be/5NlQMpy9bag
Uniphage's founders come from diverse backgrounds that allow us to bridge the gap between traditional microbiology and cutting-edge deep learning. We're in it for the long run! Moreover, Uniphage is the first company to bring cutting-edge NLP (and deep learning in general into the bacteriophage field to predict and engineer phage-host interactions to cure diseases.
Our awesome mentors from business, pharma, finance, VC, AI, plant and phage biology, biotech, marketing, and other backgrounds further supplement our skills while awesome organizations supporting us, including MassChallenge, MIT EF, IBM, iGEM Entrepreneurship, Panacea Stars at Oxford U, National U of Singapore, and others help us further our vision.
Our long-term goal is to become a metaverse for safe viral engineering. We aim to use and help others use viruses for good and prepare for future pandemics by better understanding and predicting how our friends can turn into enemies - and prevent that.
What organizations do you currently partner with, if any? How are you working with them?
North America's largest phage bank at the University of Laval to test our models, leading phage CRO, leading researchers in an advisory + consultant positions, and are currently talking to many more research and agricultural organizations.
Do you qualify for and would you like to be considered for The HP Girls Save the World Prize? If you select Yes, explain how you are qualified for the prize in the additional question that appears.
NoDo you qualify for and would you like to be considered for The Pozen Social Innovation Prize? If you select Yes, explain how you are qualified for the prize in the additional question that appears.
NoSolution Team
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Sofia Sigal-Passeck Co-founder and CEO, Uniphage
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Solution Name
Uniphage Inc.