AgBio conference addresses industry collaboration, emerging trends

A panel of experts said at the AgBio conference for North Carolina and Virginia ag-bio leaders that better collaboration in agriculture-biotechnology would help propel the industry forward.

“I don’t think we should be innovating in silos,” said Toni Bucci, founder and CEO of Sable Fermentation, a Wake Forest biomanufacturer that helps food and ag-bio companies scale precision fermentation. “The food and ag industries are a little behind the pharmaceutical industry. If we really want to advance, we need to get past the barrier of working in silos and share information.”

Collaboration between ag-bio companies and between industry and academia took center stage during an afternoon panel discussion at AgBio 2025: Innovating Agricultural Resilience.

The conference, held at the North Carolina Biotechnology Center the day after a tour and reception at North Carolina State University’s Plant Sciences Building, was hosted by four entities across the two states:

• NCLifeSci, the trade association for North Carolina’s life sciences industry
• VirginiaBio, the statewide trade group representing Virginia’s life sciences industry
• The Institute for Advanced Learning and Research, a research and economic development nonprofit in Danville, Va.
• NCBiotech

In addition to discussions on industry collaboration, several key topics in ag-bio were highlighted during the conference, including innovation, funding, policy, intellectual property and the growth of controlled environment agriculture, or growing crops in settings such as greenhouses and vertical farms.

Getting university research into the field

Zhiwu (Drew) Wang, assistant professor of biological systems engineering at Virginia Tech, said during the “bioeconomy intersection” panel that university researchers must do more to understand the needs of industry and enable businesses to apply university discoveries.

“That’s the gap I see in universities,” said Wang, who also serves as an extension specialist. “I work with industry a lot, and from that I see there is a big gap between fundamental research and applied research.”

Other panelists agreed on a related problem: The need for scale. New ag-bio discoveries might work well in the university setting, but when taking them into industry, they sometimes can’t be replicated at the scale needed for the production of crops, food ingredients, or processes such as fermentation.

Andrew Magyar, co-founder of Capra Biosciences, a Sterling, Va., startup that uses biological processes to make renewable chemicals, recalled the challenge in ensuring that the company’s equipment could enable higher production.

“The scale-up from our 10-milliliter bioreactor to this 400-liter reactor was incredibly difficult,” he said. “We were stalled for months on it because we just couldn’t overcome contamination.”

After calling in industry experts and working on it for several months, the team finally found the culprit – a faulty valve. Magyar said answers to challenging issues in scaling ag-bio production can come from a variety of sources, including university researchers, but problems are most likely solved by people with considerable experience.

Forging industry partnerships

When commercializing a new ag-bio product, it helps to use renewable products. Bonumose, a Charlottesville, Va., producer of the natural sweetener tagatose, built and scaled production in a year, thanks in part to sourcing readily available equipment and raw materials. Industry partnerships and investments from large cane-sugar refiners and the Hershey Co. helped Bonumose ramp up.

Finding plentiful, inexpensive resources for production isn’t always possible in ag-bio. But working with industry partners, startups can improve their odds of sourcing raw materials and production equipment, said Ed Rogers, Bonumose’s CEO and co-founder.

“There’s nothing inhibiting the scaling of our technology because we use commodity feedstocks and starches that are globally abundant,” he said. “Tagatose is essentially a drop-in replacement for sugar in food production, so you don’t have to retool. And we have some fantastic partners.”

Success in ag-bio depends on relationships between companies, researchers, farmers and food producers, with nature at the center, said Heather Smith, head of regional strategy for North America at Denmark-based Novonesis, a global leader in biosolutions.

“When we’re talking about how the bioeconomy can help support our farmers and help support this industry, we’re looking towards nature,” she said. “When we think about the bioeconomy, biology is one of the youngest sciences. That means there is so much room for opportunity and so many things that we could be doing more of.”