Resurrect Bio, a UK biotechnology company developing disease-resistance traits for crops, today announced a joint development agreement with Bejo, a leading vegetable breeding company, to explore new approaches to disease resistance in spinach. The collaboration will focus on resistance to spinach downy mildew, widely recognised as one of the most destructive diseases affecting spinach production worldwide.
The announcement comes at a time when seed companies are seeking faster, more targeted ways to respond to evolving disease pressures, while supporting resilient production systems and reducing reliance on chemical inputs.
Grown year-round and consumed around the world in every season, spinach is valued for its nutritional profile as a low-calorie crop rich in vitamins and minerals. As a fast-growing leafy crop produced across multiple growing cycles each year, disease resistance typically breaks down quickly. For growers, disease resistance is an important characteristic of a spinach variety, alongside general resilience and leaf colour. For Bejo, it is a crop worth investing in for the future.
Bejo and Resurrect Bio first began working together several years ago, when Resurrect Bio was in the early stages of exploring the potential of its technology. Since then, Resurrect Bio has continued to develop and validate its approach, and the collaboration has now been formalised through a joint development agreement.
Under this agreement, Resurrect Bio will apply its targeted trait discovery approach to identify disease-resistance mechanisms that could support the development of more resilient spinach varieties. The project brings together Bejo’s expertise in vegetable breeding with Resurrect Bio’s work in restoring and strengthening crop immunity.
Resurrect Bio makes crops resistant to disease by identifying where plant immune systems have been defeated by pathogens. Its targeted trait discovery approach is designed to uncover resistance mechanisms that can restore or improve immune function faster than conventional breeding approaches, creating actionable disease-resistance traits that can be taken forward by seed companies through their own breeding and innovation pipelines.
“Spinach is a strong candidate for this kind of work because it is fast-growing, widely consumed and affected by a major global pathogen in downy mildew,” said Dr Cian Duggan, CEO and Co-Founder of Resurrect Bio. “This collaboration with Bejo is an opportunity to apply our disease-resistance trait discovery approach to a crop that matters to growers, breeders and consumers around the world. By combining Resurrect Bio’s understanding of plant-pathogen interactions with Bejo’s deep crop breeding expertise, we can explore new routes to spinach disease resistance that are grounded in the biology of how the pathogen interacts with the crop.”
Dr Laurens Kroon, Head of Research at Bejo said: “This collaboration reflects Bejo’s commitment to innovation in vegetable breeding and to developing high-quality spinach varieties with strong and durable disease resistance. Our aim is to guarantee greater stability in spinach production and extend the lifetime of crop varieties and their resistance, helping to ensure a reliable supply of a vegetable consumed worldwide.”
For Resurrect Bio, the agreement marks another important step in its commercial development, following the completion of its Series A in May 2026, which raised a total of $10.3 million. The partnership demonstrates how the company’s platform can be applied across different crops and disease species, supporting its wider ambition to work with leading seed companies to develop stronger and more durable crop disease resistance.
