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Annual Awards Program Recognizes Innovation in Agricultural & Food Technologies Around the Globe
On August 25, we announced that our very own Olly Peoples has been selected as “AgTech CEO of the Year” in the 2022 AgTech Breakthrough Awards conducted by AgTech Breakthrough, a leading market intelligence organization that recognizes the top companies, technologies and products in the global agricultural and food technology markets.
Peoples serves as President and Chief Executive Officer of Yield10 Bioscience, which is developing Camelina sativa (“Camelina”) as sustainable platform crop to produce feedstock oil for biofuels, omega-3 oil, and longer-term, PHA bioplastic. He received a Ph.D. in Molecular Biology from the University of Aberdeen, Scotland and is an inventor of over ninety patents and patent applications worldwide.
Research conducted by Peoples at MIT established the fundamental methods and tools for engineering bacteria and plants to produce PHA bioplastics. Since its founding in 2017, Yield10’s research team has achieved numerous milestones in the discovery and development of novel seed yield and oil content traits as well as deploying novel traits into Camelina to produce proprietary varieties of the crop.
Under People’s leadership, Yield10 is executing a program for seed scale-up and seed production to launch Camelina as a new commercial crop in the U.S. and Canada. Varieties of both spring and winter Camelina have already been identified for initial commercialization in the North American biofuels market. Through a collaboration with Rothamsted Research, Yield10 is developing Camelina varieties to produce omega-3 (DHA+EPA) oil as a sustainable alternative to omega-3 oil extracted from wild-caught fish. The Company is also working to deploy advanced technology to produce the biodegradable biopolymer PHA in the seed of Camelina.
“I’m honored to receive this recognition from AgTech Breakthrough on behalf of the entire Yield10 team. I’m excited about the direction Yield10 is heading as we continue to focus on commercializing Camelina to address three fundamental challenges facing both present and future generations: climate change, global food security, decarbonizing transportation fuels, and plastic waste,” said Peoples. “As 2022 progresses, we expect to continue building our commercial capabilities, our crop discoveries and plant varieties in our target markets. We are also executing our commercial plan with the goal of launching Camelina as a platform crop to supply low-carbon feedstock oil for the biofuel market and to produce omega-3 nutritional oil and PHA bioplastic in the longer term.”
The mission of the annual AgTech Breakthrough Awards program is to conduct the industry’s most comprehensive analysis and evaluation of agricultural and food technology categories, including Internet-of-Things (IoT) and Artificial Intelligence (AI) based agricultural technologies, farm management, indoor farming, food quality, data analytics and many more. This year's program attracted more than 1,600 nominations from over 15 different countries throughout the world.
“With demand growing for vegetable oil to supply the biofuels market, new methodologies to address this need is a matter of urgency. Camelina has the potential to replicate the development of modern canola from rapeseed on an accelerated timeline based on modern technologies including genomics, metabolic engineering, and genome editing,” said Bryan Vaughn, Managing Director, AgTech Breakthrough. “Oliver Peoples is a pioneer in the field of metabolic pathway engineering, often referred to as ‘synthetic biology’, and its applications to industrial and agricultural biotechnology. We’re excited to single out his innovative work and that of Yield10 Bioscience under his leadership. Congratulations on winning ‘AgTech CEO of the Year’ for 2022.”
About AgTech Breakthrough
Part of Tech Breakthrough, a leading market intelligence and recognition platform for global technology innovation and leadership, the AgTech Breakthrough Awards program is devoted to honoring excellence in agricultural & food technologies, services, companies and products around the world. The AgTech Breakthrough Awards program provides a forum for public recognition around the achievements of AgTech companies and solutions in categories including farm management, indoor farming, FoodTech, automation, IoT and robotics, FoodTech, analytics and more. For more information visit AgTechBreakthrough.com.
Our blog posts contain forward-looking statements. These statements are not guarantees of future performance, and therefore, you should not place undue reliance on them. Investors are also cautioned that statements that are not strictly historical, constitute forward-looking statements. Such forward-looking statements are subject to a number of risks and uncertainties that could cause the actual results to differ materially from those anticipated. These risks include risks and uncertainties detailed in Yield10’s filings (10-K and 10-Q) with the SEC. The company undertakes no obligation to update any forward-looking statements in order to reflect events or circumstances that may arise after the date of the publication of the blog post.
