Greenlight Biosciences
GreenLight Biosciences delivers on sustainable production of chemicals and fuels using its patented Cell free bioprocessing technology platform.
RNA innovations
Greenlight’s revolutionary RNA innovations enable the biological conversion of economical, renewable substrates to valuable products with unprecedented flexibility and control with many applications across life and plant sciences.
“The big problems we’re thinking about at GreenLight are complex and don’t have a quick fix or silver bullet solution. Solving them requires new approaches that work with nature, not against it.”
- Andrey Zarur, Ph. D, Co-founder, President, and CEO
Greenlight is a company founded to solve big problems facing the health of people and our planet. Greenlight’s impact spans helping farmers to affordably grow crops safely and sustainably, improving the way drugs are developed and produced to quickly address global health epidemics, and enabling the innovation efforts of our partners. Many modern approaches to produce food and drugs to keep our growing population healthy have had a negative effect on the health of our planet. Clear-cutting forests for cattle, chemical residues on food, in the water and in the soil, nitrogen blooms in rivers, declining soil productivity, the loss of bees and other beneficial insects – these are all clear signs that our system is not sustainable.
Can we innovate biological solutions, inspired by nature, to address problems that are fundamentally an issue of biology? The team’s first answer to this question is found in RNA. Scientists have long envisioned the use of RNA, a naturally occurring part of the biological make-up of all living organisms, as a potential solution to a myriad of problems.
The GreenWorX biomanufacturing capability – Greenlight’s first innovation — makes it possible to produce hiqh quality RNA at commercial scale. This unique capability is helping GreenLight and its partners accelerate the development of RNA-based solutions for agriculture and life sciences. After application to plants, our RNA product disappears in a few days. And because RNA is non-toxic, it reduces safety issues for the farm workers who mix treatments from concentrates and spray apply to the crops, risking exposure to more toxic chemicals. GreenLight RNA is also produced from natural materials using a clean, enzymatic process with very little waste and no harmful emissions. Just a couple of grams of our products can be as effective as tens or hundreds of grams of products currently on the market. Lower use rates mean less exposure and risk to the environment and the people applying the product in the field.
In agriculture, Greenlight is able to go from lab to field much faster than the industry average and at a lower cost. That means responding to on-the-ground concerns faster and at a competitive price. For life sciences, there is potential to develop vaccines much more quickly. For example, the World Health Organization estimates that producing a flu vaccine takes about 5-6 months. Because RNA vaccines use a faster production method than traditional flu vaccines, there is the opportunity for a faster response to rapidly evolving pathogens like flu.
In the News
GreenLight Biosciences Closes $102M Series D To Expand RNA Products
GreenLight Biosciences raised an oversubscribed $102 million Series D funding round, enabling the Boston-based company to rapidly expand production of its RNA products for agricultural and life sciences applications.
GreenLight Biosciences has received a $3.3 million grant from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation
Grant to help develop new mRNA-based gene therapies for Sickle Cell Disease and other global health challenges