Deep Science Ventures (DSV), a UK-based deeptech venture creator, and Renaissance Philanthropy, a nonprofit fueling a 21st-century renaissance by increasing the ambition of philanthropists, scientists, and innovators, today announce a venture-creation project designed for systemic intervention in crop resilience.

Climate Emergencies Resilience Lab

The project is part of DSV and Renaissance Philanthropy’s existing partnership to form the Climate Emergencies Resilience Lab (CERL). The initiative establishes a high-ambition roadmap to address the economic threat of climate-induced crop failures by creating commercially viable, deep-tech spin-outs, moving beyond traditional genetic modification.

Technologies for resilience

The DSV and Renaissance Philanthropy partnership has identified three high-growth technical pillars ready for venture creation and institutional backing:

  • Forecasted priming: to enhance stress pathways and orchestrate developmental processes, combining short-term weather accuracy with biologicals such as RNA or peptides to tune crops in real time.
  • Environment-responsive protectants: and field-robust symbiotic microbes, enabling stress tolerance to be outsourced and reliably activated under specific conditions.
  • Foundational breeding tools: to rapidly expand the available palette of resilience traits, for example, by engineering wild relatives or donor plants to circumvent barriers including crossing, linkage drag and epistasis.

The initiative aims to ensure that innovation is targeted where it can achieve the greatest global economic and nutritional impact, by intentionally engineering the R&D, regulatory, and IP strategies toward a predetermined outcome.