Joshua Paster, FounderThis thought has been the guiding principle behind the suite of products and services that Terminus Bio offers today. Through the TerraCulture™ (TC) Service platform, Terminus Bio provides a comprehensive suite of plant tissue culture and laboratory services on a contract basis. These services are designed to address the unique challenges faced by agricultural operators. Systemic plant disease, fueled by climate change, has a devastating impact on their ability to meet market demands and to realize long term planning objectives. This in turn impacts people’s everyday lives, raising prices of food staples, medicine, and more. For Josh, an effective response to real time losses in today’s agricultural markets is not limited to services: “We see services as only part of the picture. To improve the productivity of future projects, we need to create an ecosystem of technology that will enable the next generation of scientists to take on this mission.”
Leading the charge is Dr. Jane Knapp, Chief Science Officer, whose expertise in molecular plant biology is key to Terminus Bio’s success. Dr. Knapp’s career includes tenures at prestigious institutions such as Rutgers and URI, where she spearheaded projects such as developing salt-tolerant lettuces to thrive in Nevada’s salt deserts. Her leadership underpins the innovative spirit at Terminus Bio, guiding its research efforts toward impactful discoveries. Founder Joshua Paster has an extensive background in clinical research with a focus on solid organ transplant immunology, having conducted studies at Mass General Hospital before transitioning into botanical sciences. Sam Gottschalk, finance specialist and co-founder, supports the scientific leadership and ensures Terminus Bio’s financial health and compliance with regulatory frameworks.
At its core Terminus Bio is focused on research and development, consistently applying a discovery-centric lens to its operations. Its dedicated team is committed to refining and advancing its methods and this continual pursuit of excellence ensures that Terminus Bio remains at the cutting edge of the biotechnology field, ready to meet the industry’s evolving demands.
TerraClean: A Strategic Approach to Counter Global Phytopathogen Challenges
The first virus ever identified was the Tobacco Mosaic Virus in 1935, yet nearly a century later the development and application of new technologies to prevent the massive losses caused by viral outbreaks remains slow. Waves of plant disease, natural disasters, insect infestations and dramatically shifting seasonal patterns regularly devastate large-scale crop production programs. These problems are accelerated by climate change, jeopardizing global food production.As a result, producers continue to suffer devastating economic losses to forces that are well within our control to manage.
By integrating traditional tissue culture technologies with natural science and engineering methods, Terminus Bio has launched its first TerraCulture service platform. The TerraClean platform is specifically designed to meet the viral challenges faced by the agricultural industry, using a discovery-centric approach that combines numerous scientific techniques to rapidly respond to emerging disease threats. The three core pillars that make up this platform to provide customers with novel solutions to their plant health issues are TerraID, TerraRx, and TerraCryo.
One of the unique challenges faced by the agricultural industry is the rapidly evolving nature of viruses and viroids, making them resistant to traditional diagnostic techniques. To address this problem, Terminus Bio has pioneered the application of High Throughput Next Generation Sequencing (NGS) to identify novel viral diseases through its TerraID services. Identifying NGS as a critical tool towards the advancement of the diagnostic field as a whole has enabled Terminus Bio to provide their clients with precise data concerning a complex array of diseases at a massive scale. The key to a discovery-centric approach is gathering as much data as possible to tackle the issue at hand. This is the goal of TerraID services, and valuable information regarding the unique infectious profiles of plant populations can be directly applied by customers to evolve their methods of fighting disease in the field.
Using the range of analytics available through TerraID, the TerraRx service takes a personalized plant medicine approach to treat and remediate harmful organisms and disease in precious agricultural stock plants. This approach allows Terminus Bio to localize disease within a plant, which in turn informs the course of therapeutic intervention. By applying an informed understanding of the specific host-pathogen interactions and disease mechanisms present, TerraRx services can reliably cure afflicted plant stocks. HLVd is a pathogenic disease experienced by several Terminus Bio’s clients, and in one instance the combination of TerraID and TerraRx techniques identified a concealed transmission path of this viroid through shared irrigation systems. Terminus Bio’s tissue culture cleaning protocol cured the plants of the disease, and its discovery informed sterilization efforts at the client’s facility. This allowed the client to resume cultivation secure in the knowledge that the outbreak had been eliminated.
TerraCryo and its branching biorepository services are essential for maintaining the integrity of plant specimens post-treatment. They allow for the collection, preservation, and cataloging of plant materials to address agricultural and biotechnological needs. Advanced cryogenic techniques guarantee secure, long-term storage of plant materials and are crucial in preventing contamination and preserving the purity of plant genetics. By ensuring their long-term viability and availability for future propagation, Terminus Bio allows researchers and breeders to experiment with plants secure in the knowledge that healthy reserves are always available.
The TerraClean platform represents the culmination of years of research to provide tools to an industry in need. However, the goal of Terminus Bio is to standardize protocols and equipment to empower local scientific efforts, offering access to the same level of information about their plants that years of research, expertise, and specialized equipment has allowed the company to acquire.
Section 3: Concept to Capstone - Creating a Community
The unique intersection of botanical and biological sciences that characterizes the leadership of Terminus Bio has sparked a novel approach to address shortcomings in the agritechnology field. Inspired by laboratory kits that he used throughout his decade of diverse lab experience, Josh recognized that a way to accelerate advancements in the industry could be through the development of a kit that eliminates the barrier of entry faced by new plant scientists. “For every new plant idea to come to life, developing the core skills in tissue culture that are inherent in realizing that product remains a huge hurdle. Through the development of kits, we can translate our advancements into localized labs that can help to deliver these technologies to their unique ecological needs.”
The creation of an accessible platform of technology that can exist even outside of lab services not only breaks down barriers of entry, but it also breaks down resistance to change. By generating greater visibility of effective, innovative methods of problem solving, widespread use of such kits can foster the greater acceptance of tissue culture practices. A new generation of scientists with expertise with tissue culture methods can then enter the industry, positioned to realize
We aim to provide the tools and services necessary to both respond to climate change issues and lay down the foundation of technology that will advance the industry as a whole. It’s not up to us to come up with the next plant that will improve the world, but to provide the tools to make that plant possible
their own solutions to widespread issues. Such a development would benefit all providers of key services to the industry, with Terminus Bio strategically poised to expand the scale of their complementary services.
The permeation of this technology throughout the industry will allow the field to grow, catalyzing a profound expansion of data accessible to researchers which can be used to combat endemic disease. The data generated from these kits, the biorepository of genetic information represented by TerraCryo, the database of disease pathogenesis created by TerraRX - all come together to bridge the gap between the current Terminus Bio platform and its future expansion into its nascent TerraCell platform. The development of a plant-based drug manufacturing platform represents the dedication Terminus Bio has to constant evolution, seeking new markets as the information boom generated by their core discovery-centric approach drives their future endeavors.
