By Jim Shamp, Senior Editor
After 13 years as a lawyer and prosecutor in the New York District Attorney’s office, Doug Eisner has joined the growing cadre of entrepreneurs from around the country who are putting down roots in the Triangle.
But Eisner is REALLY putting down roots.
He’s co-founder and chief operating officer of the Duke University spin-out company GrassRoots Biotechnology, a fast-rising Durham plant biotechnology firm that got start-up help last year with a $25,000 low-interest business development loan from the North Carolina Biotechnology Center.
Eisner found himself in the Triangle because he wanted something from life he wasn’t getting by practicing law. So he enrolled in the MBA program at Duke University’s Fuqua School of Business. There, he and three others had an opportunity to conduct a research project for Philip Benfey, Ph.D., professor and chair of Duke’s biology department.
The rest is history in the making as Eisner took his newly minted MBA and, with some of his Duke colleagues, established GrassRoots.
Shortly after the Biotechnology Center loan was approved, and partly bolstered by that vetting process, GrassRoots landed a $150,000 Phase I Small Business Technology grant from the National Science Foundation.
Then came another boost. “Phil Benfey is well-known and well-respected in the plant biology world,” said Eisner. “He developed a research plan, and our director of research showed that to Monsanto.” The company signed a three-year pact in January with Monsanto to explore ways to use GrassRoots technology to discover promoters and genes for improving Monsanto’s row crops.
Then, earlier this year, GrassRoots also won an $80,000 Phase I Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) grant from the U.S. Department of Agriculture to study new ways of turning grasses into ethanol.
“That Biotechnology Center funding was the first money we got,” recalled Eisner. “We had legal bills, had no money, and had to pay for trips to St. Louis and some other items, so that was really important. It gave us a little push and got the momentum started. It also just reflects well on a company to get the support of a Biotechnology Center loan. It left us in a good position to get other funding in this environment, and helped us find a good partner in Monsanto.”
“There are two sides to our business,” he explained. “One is food crops, such as that represented by the Monsanto agreement. The other side is making better crops to use for biofuels, crops that could grow across North Carolina, all over the Southeast, that’d be better than what we currently have. Miscanthus, sweet sorghum, switchgrass are going to be special targets for us.”
The company’s core technology, spun from Benfey’s lab, is dubbed the RootArray system, which monitors gene expression within tiny developing plant roots to understand how genes are controlling plant development. That could lead to genes and gene promoters that can increase crop yields via better drought resistance and other desirable characteristics.
“We conduct this research using our proprietary technologies and proprietary procedures,” he said. “Promoters are the region of the gene that actually tells the gene when and where to turn on. So it’s vital to the function of any transgenic plant. We have a system that allows us to understand the gene network in a very detailed way, and we believe it’ll let us find gene promoters that haven’t been discovered yet, in a systematic, fast and streamlined way.”
GrassRoots’ research is conducted mostly on Arabidopsis, which Eisner called “the lab mouse of the plant world.” But the young company’s plant biologists and computational biologists also do some work in corn and rice, and are adding sweet sorghum and switchgrass to the fold.
“Researchers can find the genes of interest, find the promoter, and modify the plant through breeding or through genetic modification,” said Eisner. “When they find genes of interest they can employ standard breeding techniques to enhance crops or they can transgenically modify a plant, taking a gene and placing it into the cell of the plant. That’s faster than breeding. But those are standard protocols many companies use.
“We’re filling our research pipeline by finding those traits more quickly and systematically than other methods being employed. Most of our focus is on finding promoters—that little section of DNA that tells the gene what to do when. We’re especially good at finding promoters that can even express genes in specific tissues.”
GrassRoots recently announced plans to move its headquarters into an 8,300-square foot space on the second floor of the Venable Center campus in downtown Durham, a historic rehabilitation project of the former Venable Tobacco Co. buildings. There, the firm expects to grow from its current eight employees to 25 in the next few years.
“Things are going pretty well,” Eisner said. “We’re kind of excited.”