In 2023, ARAUCO invested nearly US$50 million in TreeCo, a company that uses CRISPR genome-editing technology in trees, with the aim of making them more sustainable and changing the fate of forestry worldwide. 

The two companies are now working hand in hand to achieve this goal.

Trees that are more resistant to disease and climate change, whose growth processes are more efficient and that provide a raw material that allows to produce more pulp per cubic meter of wood. More sustainable trees that would change the forestry industry forever. 

In the United States there is a group of scientists working to produce them: TreeCo, a company that is modifying the genetics of trees with CRISPR (Clustered Regularly Interspaced Short Palindromic Repeats) technology, which allows the genome of living organisms to be edited in a non-transgenic way.

TreeCo is currently located in the laboratories of North Carolina State University (NCSU) and, as of September 2023, ARAUCO became its majority shareholder, with an investment of approximately US$50 million. This is a bet on an innovation that promises to change the future of the forestry industry, making it more sustainable and thus improving the quality of life of future generations.

The idea is planted 

In June 2018, Jack Wang and Rodolphe Barrangou, co-founders of TreeCo, met for the first time. They remark that while it was difficult to match their schedules, when they managed to get together there was instant chemistry. “It wasn’t in a series of meetings. It was one single event, one single gathering, where there was kind of a meeting of the minds,” Barrangou recalls, adding: “On that particular day, a grand vision to address those grand challenges faced by the forestry industry was born. There was a sense of clarity in defining a vision, achievable by combining our skill sets, knowledge, expertise, passion, and aspirations. It just clicked.” 

Wang expressed his opinion about current problems of forest companies and how, although the knowledge in genetics existed, to date there was no technology to apply the findings in a meaningful way in this industry.

“Rodolphe brought insights from other disciplines, his experience, his knowledge, his entrepreneurship, and really opened my eyes to things that I didn’t know existed, or things I didn’t know was possible. So, we connected the power of CRISPR genome editing with tree genetic insights,” says Wang. 

And so, in just one hour, the two agreed to start working together on what would later become TreeCo. However, although this was its formal beginning, this story had been years in the making for its main players.

The forester and the pioneer 

“Jack has what I call the wisdom of the forest.” This is how Barrangou describes his colleague, highlighting his temperance and intelligence in facing the challenges of running a science and technology-based company. “He’s very driven, he’s very ambitious, and he’s very smart and very sharp. He has the wisdom and the patience to do what it takes, one step at a time, one year at a time, one problem at a time. And I like his long-term tenacity and vision to run the marathon that we have to go through to be able to work in forestry,” he adds.

“For me, I’m like a CRISPR pioneer,” says Rodolphe Barrangou. He has been involved in this technology since very early in his career, being involved in the first patent, the first big document and the first product. In addition, he has been a great collaborator of Jennifer Doudna, 2020 Nobel Prize in Chemistry, awarded for her findings in this innovation. 

He is also an outstanding entrepreneur with multiple patents to his credit, converging in him the qualities of an outstanding scientist and those of a skilled entrepreneur with a developed commercial instinct. “He is a problem solver like I’ve never seen before,” says Wang, who adds: “It is not trivial whatsoever taking a good innovation, but making real-world impact from it, that is where most scientists fail, but Rodolphe has repetitively been successful in democratizing innovations like CRISPR through all different fields, from therapeutics to agriculture, and now, of course, in forestry.”

The branches grow

When TreeCo started up, they had broad support from NCSU, but they knew they needed a major industry partner with forestry knowledge who could take the innovations and deploy them on a significant scale.

“Rodolphe asked me, out of all the forest companies we’ve ever worked with, who would I pick? And I immediately, without needing to think said: ‘ARAUCO. It has to be ARAUCO,’” recalls Wang.

He was familiar with Chilean forestry as he had known Claudio Balocchi, senior researcher in Genetics at ARAUCO’s Bioforest and now director at TreeCo, for years. Both had studied at NCSU and shared different academic spaces for years, long before Barrangou appeared on the scene. 

“They invited us to participate as strategic partners to give an operational twist to their technology,” says Balocchi about the moment he was contacted by the entrepreneurs. When he brought the topic to ARAUCO, the researcher suggested that CRISPR was the technological future in genetics, which was being demonstrated in different industries. “We reviewed the topic and, finally, we were interested in being more than a strategic partner, we wanted to invest in the company,” he says.

The Bioforest Innovation Center is, just like its name, the place where the forestry company develops and applies state-of-the-art technology in biotechnology and pulp laboratories, greenhouses, forestry assets and industrial plants. The aim is to contribute to climate change mitigation and adaptation, and to circular economy from science to the forestry industry. 

About 30 researchers work at the facilities in Concepción, where there is constant contact with the TreeCo offices and laboratories, as the US team is in charge of developing the plants, while in Chile they are in charge of evaluating their potential benefits in the field.

Through mutagenesis, TreeCo is currently editing the eucalyptus genome by targeting the genes for lignin formation and, probably by 2025, as they say, the plants would be sent to Bioforest’s laboratories, where, in three to five years, they could demonstrate that some of the edited lines work according to their expectations. Then, operational plantings with the edited clones would begin. “By 2040 we should harvest these trees because they must be tried and tested and, once everything has been validated, we will start commercial planting,” explains Sebastián Mandiola, R&D manager at the forestry company.

Mandiola, who is also chairman of TreeCo’s board of directors, explains the importance of the collaborative work between the two laboratories: “At ARAUCO, through Bioforest, we are a very present partner. We have regular meetings with Jack and Rodolphe. Claudio meets with them once a week and I meet with them once a month, and there we are constantly discussing and creating synergies for new ways to move forward.”

For future generations

For TreeCo’s co-founders, it was not random to enter into forestry, as they saw the opportunity to generate a greater impact than in any other industry. “We can use CRISPR to develop medicines and we’re going to save lives, and it’s great, but really how many lives are we going to impact? When Jack and I decided to commit ourselves to forestry, we realized that we were going to impact billions of people. It’s literally everybody on planet Earth, plus the next hundred million who will be born,” says Barrangou. 

This focus on benefiting future generations is another reason why the partnership between TreeCo and ARAUCO, and consequently with its parent company Empresas Copec, made sense. This year, the Company unveiled the redefinition of its corporate purpose “To shape the world for future generations,” giving priority to a long-term view of its business. Barrangou explains the synchronization: “There is a perfect alignment to generate the most tangible and realistic impact we can have. It’s a big vision and that’s why it’s so important to work with people who share a commitment to the time frame in which we operate. Why don’t more people have the courage to do this? It’s a mystery to me, but I’m glad we share this common motivation with Empresas Copec.”

Long-term view

At TreeCo, Bioforest and ARAUCO, there are high expectations associated with the work they are engaged in today. Jack Wang is very clear about this: “I have told this to Rodolphe and Claudio, that my life’s goal is to stand on top of a hill, looking down vast forests that are our CRISPR edited trees. And that’s important to me because it means that we have really debottlenecked grand challenges in forest biotechnology and that we have democratized CRISPR from a technical perspective, from an ecological perspective, and from a regulatory and social perspective.”

“If we were able, with TreeCo and other technologies, to repopulate or reforest places that have lost their capacity to sustain forests and turn them into lungs for CO2 consumption, it would be very comforting, because at the end of the day we are not only adding value to ARAUCO, but also for generations to come,” reckons Sebastián Mandiola.

For Claudio Balocchi, there is also a sense of pride associated with what they seek to achieve: “An important part of my professional life goal has been to contribute knowledge to obtain sustained progress over time. I feel very fulfilled to have found this tool and to have taken it to ARAUCO, as it is the future to be able to continue growing in genetic gains in the long term and to face challenges associated with sustainability and climate change.”

However, they know that changing the world requires collaboration between different players, as Barrangou says: “If we could work with the governments and other partners and shareholders that share our visions, that share our values, there’s probably no limit to how far we can go. And that’s one of the key reasons why we are an Empresas Copec portfolio company, because we have the aspiration that this is just the beginning, and that we want to convey and translate that promise into the real world at scale.”