Editor’s note: Tammy Lee Stanoch is the president & CEO of Recombinetics, an animal gene-editing company based in St. Paul, Minnesota
Our world population is projected to reach 9.8 billion in 2050. This, coupled with limitations in arable land and water, means meeting our future food needs will require adding new innovative and transformative technologies to our current capabilities in agriculture.
Genetic improvement via gene editing is one of these innovative solutions to revolutionize agriculture, where we can deliver more sustainable animal health and welfare traits into our agricultural production systems with great precision, speed and economy.
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My company has products ready for market that enable “naturally hornless” (polled) and “naturally cool” (heat tolerant) cattle. Both types of animals were bred by copying naturally-occurring traits already found in cattle.
Gene editing methods, like naturally-hornless and naturally-cool, are proven safe and provide identical outcomes at the genome sequence level as well as being expressed identically for animal type, behavior, and appearance, similar to what could be achieved using slower, traditional breeding methods.
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We hope [US Secretary of Agriculture Sonny] Perdue will request a regulatory move from the FDA to the USDA for gene-edited food animals.
Read full, original post: Regulatory restructure of biotech is critical to the future of US agriculture
