Nearly two years after the 39 North AgTech Innovation District formally became an independent nonprofit, the district is beginning to bolster and attract related startups to the St. Louis region.
Companies including Cquesta, EpiCrop Technologies and EpiMethyl Analytics have already taken up space within the 600-acre innovation district, with many more expressing interest in its offerings, said 39North Executive Director Emily Lohse-Busch.
“There has been this pent-up demand for a long time for more companies in this space to enter the St. Louis market,” she said.
A handful of reasons make St. Louis an attractive place to relocate to, said Sally Mackenzie, chief science officer for EpiCrop Technologies and EpiMethyl Analytics, who moved to the region last June from Penn State University. The companies are based around the field of epigenetics, or the way genes are expressed, she said.
It’s a way to build more resilience into crops by learning how plants grow under ideal growing conditions versus how they recalibrate growth in poor conditions, Mackenzie explained.
“We take an elite variety that’s got perfect genetics, but we put on top of it much more resilient epigenetics, and now that crop is supercharged to perform well in the field when environments are adverse,” she said. “You’re trying to give this extra push to a crop both toward yield and resilience that we haven’t had before.”
It’s the kind of breakthrough that could have applications for the specialized row cropping system in the U.S. and developing countries that face challenges of growing a meaningful crop on marginal lands, Mackenzie said.
“A different problem but same solution,” she said.
Mackenzie said she found the St. Louis region attractive to relocate to because of how quickly operations could get up and running. For example, she said she’s using some of Danforth’s plant growth facilities while EpiCrop (a subsidiary of EpiMethyl Analytics) establishes its own in the coming years, allowing it to develop and launch its technology more quickly.
“There’s an appreciation for innovation, for entrepreneurship, for new technology. So it’s a good home base,” Mackenzie said. “The infrastructure [here] is conducive to plant science. I can’t simply go to Boston and build greenhouses, but you can in St. Louis.”
Lohse-Busch said she and her team made a concerted effort to demonstrate how the region in general, not necessarily just the innovation district she runs, would be supportive. She added that this is especially important in attracting companies whose needs aren’t entirely matched by 39North’s immediate offerings.
Moolec is a good example. The company, which is focused on creating genetically modified plants that produce more and different proteins, relocated from Texas to lab space in the Cortex Innovation District this year.
“We were very interested in the 39North District, but all of the spaces available were too large for us,” said Moolec Chief Technology Officer Martín Salinas. “But they were the ones connecting us with people at Cortex and Missouri agencies to check for opportunities or incentives.”
Moolec is keen to be located closer to where most of the country’s soybeans are grown. Salinas said that one of the company’s focuses is modifying a soybean to produce some of the proteins that are traditionally present in meat.
This would make it easier to produce plant-based meat alternatives that aren’t as ultra-processed, he said, adding the U.S. is a large market for these kinds of alternative ingredients.
“It’s not as healthy as someone would suppose, being a plant-based product,” Salinas said. “Our idea is to replace that [with] something more internal. The plant will be giving you everything you want.”
He said the company had been considering Indianapolis and Chicago as potential destinations but ultimately chose St. Louis because of the attention and quick responses it got from the multiple innovation districts in the region.
“Instead of waiting for a week to have an answer, [they] were replying like in the very same day,” Salinas said. “This is a great place where we can grow organically. We can see how we can expand in the same location without moving.”
While Moolec isn’t directly located in 39North, Lohse-Busch said it was imperative to make sure they’re connected to the district as a company with strong potential to expand. That includes hosting an event soon where the company could meet dozens of people in the plant science world who could potentially become new Moolec employees, she explained.
“Part of what we know they’re looking to do here is hire immediately,” she said. “What a value for our AgTech ecosystem to have 39North helping to facilitate those types of connections as well.”
Lohse-Busch added that the next things that are needed to sustain this growth include more lab space and greenhouses.
This also means there is good opportunity and support for homegrown startup companies in the AgTech space.
Metablify, which won an Arch Grant last year, comes from a breakthrough by researchers at the Danforth Plant Science Center to better analyze massive numbers of liquid chromatography mass spectroscopy (LC-MS) outputs. LC-MS is an analytical chemistry tool that can identify the chemical compounds in a specific mixture, but current software is limited by how many of these results it can handle, said Metablify President and CEO Mike Bielski.
“For us, the more samples the better,” he said. “It’s going to enable new types of experiments because a lot of the limitations of the current software prevent researchers from doing the types of experiments that they would really want to do.”
In the agricultural landscape, that could be determining how a particular fertilizer, soil treatment or seed treatment affects a plant. But Bielski said he sees application in the medical world, too, with blood samples and identifying specific biomarkers or disease states.
He said the company, which is spinning out of the Danforth Center via the Danforth Technology Co., is already conducting pilots that are “going really, really well.”
This is Bielski’s second time becoming involved with a St. Louis-based AgTech company, after co-founding NewLeaf Symbiotics more than a decade ago.
“All of the talent that’s clustered here, the support that [the] Danforth [Center] is providing; as an entrepreneur who can work anywhere, those things are very exciting,” he said. “The support and the outreach has been really tremendous, and a big part of why this is my second company [in St. Louis].”
This underscores how Lohse-Busch describes her strategy for 39North: creating the conditions and connections where new AgTech companies can thrive anywhere within the St. Louis region.
“We continue to have so much inbound [communication] from AgTech companies that want to have a footprint in 39North,” she said. “When they say 39North, in many cases, they’re talking about the St. Louis region at large.”
