Unlocking Outback Genomics
We are mapping the 20-million-year evolutionary survival mechanisms of the Australian Outback
Global industrial agriculture has hit a rigid biological ceiling. As climate volatility inflicts sudden, episodic thermal shocks on food corridors, traditional linear crop breeding simply cannot adapt fast enough to preserve yield stability. While AI-driven genetic engineering represents a potential avenue, computational prediction alone remains an unproven framework for introducing stable, novel stress-tolerant genes into elite crops.
Nature has already field-tested the solution. The Australian Outback has spent 20 million years evolving plant life in one of the most volatile, hyper-arid, and thermally hostile environments on Earth. This landscape represents an unmapped, living genetic archive of extreme climate adaptation.
Banksia Bio bridges evolutionary deep time and deep-tech synthetic biology. We are not engineering a single, isolated crop trait; we are building a proprietary discovery engine that decodes outback extremophiles to extract complex, proven environmental resilience toolkits for global staple crops.
The Founding Team
Dr. Andrei Herdean | Chief Scientific Officer
Andrei is the lead plant biophysicist and crop engineering specialist. He brings to the team over 20 years of experience in plant genetics and precision biophysical tracking of plant stress, along with extensive global expertise in advanced plant phenotyping across diverse and hostile agricultural corridors in Europe, Africa, and the Australian outback. Since 2009, he has led cutting-edge phenomics pipelines in Australia, pioneering the systems that capture plant survival strategies.
Dr. Shawn Price | Chief Executive Officer
Shawn is a Chartered Chemical and Bioprocess Engineer specialising in the commercialisation of biotechnology, with experience leading engineering teams at VC-funded biotech startups and consulting engagements across bioenergy, bioplastics, food and other sustainable biotechnologies. At Banksia Bio he leads commercial strategy, capital formation and the seed industry partnerships that move our traits from wild plants into commercial crops. He also oversees the Banksia's intellectual property strategy and regulatory compliance.
Dr. Agota Tuzesi | Co-Founder and Lead Molecular Geneticist
Agota is a trained ecologist and molecular geneticist specializing in high-throughput genomics, next-generation sequencing, and complex bioinformatics frameworks. After pioneering large-scale human genetic research architectures, at Banksia Bio she directs the molecular and computational pipeline required to deconstruct outback plant genomes and precisely isolate the novel genetic switches that govern adaptation.