Avisptosis aims to bring greater sustainability to global food production by developing GM chickens resistant to highly pathogenic avian influenza virus (HPAI).

Chickens are an essential poultry in global food production. However, recent outbreaks of highly pathogenic avian influenza have frequently caused serious damage to poultry farms across many regions, threatening food security. While vaccine-centered countermeasures are being implemented, they have not been successful due to the emergence of mutant viruses from infected wild birds and cross-border transmission by migratory birds. As a result, mass culling of chickens occurs at many poultry farms every year. To address such challenges, we will develop a new mechanism of viral defense that prevents viral amplification within individual animals by actively inducing infected cells to undergo cell death, thereby contributing to global food security.

Background

HPAI is currently the most threatening infectious disease to the poultry industry. HPAI has caused many chickens to die worldwide and to be culled for disease prevention, resulting in soaring prices of chicken meat and eggs.

To protect the poultry industry, ensure food security, and prevent the recurrence of influenza pandemics, it is necessary to reduce the number of chickens that contract HPAI, develop symptoms, and die.

However, despite this situation, the introduction of vaccines, which are existing HPAI countermeasures, has not progressed very much globally. This is because existing vaccines have several problems.

• Insufficient infection prevention: HPAI has high infectivity and pathogenicity, so it is extremely difficult to completely prevent infection and disease onset. Additionally, since antigenic drift or shift in HA and NA reduces vaccine effectiveness, it is difficult to stably suppress HPAI onset.
• Difficulty in detecting infected individuals: Vaccines provide intermediate HPAI resistance, making it difficult to distinguish infected individuals from healthy ones in the early stages of infection. This delays early detection of infected individuals and risks facilitating viral spread within the population.
• Obscuring viral infection history: Vaccines promote antibody production against HPAI in the body. This makes it difficult to determine infection history based solely on HPAI antibody presence or absence. Some vaccines can differentiate vaccine-derived antibodies from infection-derived ones [1]. However, their universal application is limited by efficacy and cost considerations. This has disadvantages such as making it impossible to guarantee safety as food products.

Stakeholders Voice

During the course of our Human Practice activities, we had the opportunity to speak with government officials and poultry farmers involved in HPAI prevention. There, we learned that many poultry farmers desire the introduction of vaccines as an HPAI countermeasure.

Additionally, amid these circumstances, Japan, which had been cautious about introducing HPAI vaccines, has begun considering their introduction. In August of this year, the first Avian Influenza Vaccine Technical Review Meeting was held at the Ministry of Agriculture, Forestry and Fisheries, where the pros and cons of introducing HPAI vaccines were discussed [2].

As in this example from Japan, the demand for HPAI countermeasures like vaccines is increasing globally.

However, as explained in the Background, vaccines alone cannot solve the current HPAI problem highlighting the need for innovative HPAI countermeasures.

Our Solution

We have developed a strategy to create a viral defense system called COCCO, generate HPAI-resistant GM chickens, named "Cure Chicken" equipped with this system, and distribute them globally.

Based on the issues identified through interviews with government officials, experts, poultry farmers, and consumer organizations, we defined the following requirements for Cure Chicken.

• Ultra-powerful infection prevention: Does not develop symptoms or shed virus even when exposed to the virus.
• Ensuring clarity of infection history: By using a viral defense system that does not produce antibodies, infection history can be clearly determined through antibody testing.
• Resistance to viral mutations: Maintains effectiveness even if mutations occur in the viral nucleotide or amino acid sequences.
• Does not accelerate viral mutation: By increasing susceptibility to the virus, it makes it difficult to generate selective pressure for the virus to evade immunity.
• Ensuring safety as food: By using a system that employs only proteins that chickens and mallards naturally express inside their cells, it also ensures safety as food.

Our viral infection defense system, COCCO (Chicken-Optimized Circuit for Containing Contagious Outbreaks), in contrast to many previous viral defense systems, makes cells hyper-susceptible to viruses and immediately induces apoptosis upon viral infection. This prevents the virus from replicating within infected cells. By expressing this system in all cells of the chicken's body, it is expected to block viral replication throughout the body.

In this way, Avisptosis has designed and developed Cure Chicken—a GM chicken whose cells die rapidly upon viral infection—as a practical product. This GM chicken satisfies the requirements mentioned above.

• Ultra-powerful infection prevention: Because the defense system works in cells throughout the body, it is a strategy suitable for HPAI, which replicates viruses throughout the body. Additionally, because it kills the virus along with the cells, the virus is less likely to remain in the body, and the amount shed is also suppressed.
• Ensuring clarity of infection history: Using only innate immune factors, the system avoids inducing antibody production, thereby ensuring a clear infection history.
• Resistance to viral mutations: Because it recognizes the structure of double-stranded RNA, the system operates even if mutations enter the nucleotide sequence.
• Does not accelerate viral mutation: In Avisptosis's system (COCCO), because chickens are modified to "become hyper-susceptible upon viral infection" using dsRNA that appears during infection as a cue, it is expected that selective pressure to produce strongly resistant strains will not operate.
• Ensuring safety as food: A system using only proteins present in the genomes of chickens and mallards (RIG-I, PKR, APAF1, Caspase9), producing no dangerous proteins.

Competitors

We researched past avian influenza countermeasures and compiled a list of competitors for Cure Chicken.

Existing Competitive Products

• Avian influenza vaccines: Already used in some regions, but there are disadvantages associated with their use [3].
• Avian influenza therapeutics: Used for conservation of rare bird species from avian influenza, but impractical for use in the poultry industry [4].

Competitive Products in Research Stage

• Other avian influenza-resistant gene-edited chickens: These primarily include the chickens developed in the UK in 2011 [5]. They have strong virus resistance but are not complete. Because they involve the insertion of sequences homologous to parts of the influenza virus genome, they are generally considered difficult to implement as GM food.
• Avian influenza-resistant genome-edited chickens: There are various types, but many delete substances necessary for viral infection. They have strong virus resistance, but strongly accelerate viral mutation and are prone to generating mutations that can infect other animals (such as humans) [6].

We compared these existing competitors with our GM chicken.

Market Analyze

Because Cure Chicken is a GM chicken, no direct precedent exists for its commercial implementation, and we could not identify a clear existing market. Therefore, we conducted analysis based on three relevant markets. This analysis was conducted with advice from venture capitalist Dr. Tamiya.

<Minimum Market>

Among related markets, the smallest market size is the avian influenza countermeasure-related market. This includes various things such as HPAI vaccines and diagnostic reagents.

Avian influenza countermeasure-related market size:

According to Coherent Market Insights, the global avian influenza countermeasure-related market size reached ＄158 million in 2025 and is expected to reach ＄224 million by 2032 at a CAGR of 5.1% [7].

<Mid-sized Market>

Cure Chicken is a poultry breeding stock developed using genetic technology. Therefore, we identified relevance to the poultry breeding and genetics market.

Poultry breeding and genetics market size:

According to Precision Business Insights, the global poultry breeding and genetics market size was $586.4 million in 2023 and is predicted to grow significantly between 2024 and 2030 at a CAGR of 7.4% [8].

<Largest Market>

Cure Chicken, as an HPAI-resistant chicken, has the potential to replace existing chickens and become the core of the global poultry industry. In that case, it was inferred that we should look at the entire global poultry industry as our market.

Market size of the entire global poultry industry:

According to Cognitive Market Research, the global poultry market size reached ＄292.896 billion in 2021 and is expected to reach ＄564.504 billion by 2033 at a CAGR of 5.62% [9]. Since more than 90% of the entire poultry industry is chicken-related [10], we estimate that the market size for the global chicken industry is 90% of the aforementioned total poultry market size.

Marketing Strategy

Strategy for acceptance by the market, consumers, and government

Because Cure Chicken is genetically modified (with foreign gene insertion), societal acceptance is crucial; without it, the product will not be purchased by consumers, and our business cannot be sustained or grown. However, like GM soybeans, there are already examples of practical implementation as food in some countries and regions. This is because GM crops can be cultivated in regions that have not ratified the Cartagena Protocol [11]. However, even in such countries, there are mainly three reasons that make it difficult to succeed in businesses selling GM foods.

The first main reason is the low demand for conventional GM foods. Many foods (crops other than major grains, fish, etc.) can be substituted by other foods, and even when risks were taken to make them GM foods, they failed to gain acceptance due to a lack of strong demand.

However, our chicken is different. It has strong necessity in the following points:

• Importance of chicken as a protein source: Chickens are a protein source that can be produced efficiently and inexpensively with lower environmental impact compared to livestock such as pigs and cattle. Currently, approximately 12% of the protein in food worldwide comes from chicken meat and eggs. Reducing the production efficiency of the poultry industry to prevent HPAI spread has a tremendous impact on global food security. The spread of our chickens will greatly contribute to maintaining the production efficiency of the poultry industry against HPAI.
• Contribution to maintaining public health: HPAI has undergone repeated mutations in recent years and has increased its potential for human infection. As of 2019, transmission of H5N1 avian influenza virus from chickens and others to humans has been confirmed in countries around the world, with 860 infected people, of whom 454 died [12]. In poultry farms, viruses infect chickens, replicate and undergo mutations, and poultry farms act as critical sites for viral evolution. If our GM chickens spread, they will suppress the spread of viral infections at poultry farms and suppress further evolution of viruses. This will prevent the emergence of new influenza virus pandemics, such as the one that caused the Spanish flu.
• Contribution to animal welfare: In recent years, intensive chicken farming focused on production efficiency (such as windowless chicken houses) has become a major problem from an animal welfare perspective. However, maintaining such production systems is essential for food security. Therefore, by reducing the need for mass culling caused by HPAI in intensive poultry farming systems, we contribute to improving animal welfare.

The second reason is strong opposition from consumers, making the food disliked by consumers. We will implement the following promotional measures to reduce consumer doubts and aversion as much as possible.

• Product name that is easy to accept: Through interviews with stakeholders, we learned that the product name greatly changes the consumer perception of the food. Therefore, we gave it the name Cure Chicken, which has a cute and soft feel in both Japanese and English.
• Media Outreach: We will disseminate appropriate information to many consumers through various media. At that time, we will disseminate information in cooperation with reliable media so that misleading information or reporting with inappropriate words does not occur. While sincerely conveying the facts, it is crucial to carefully plan our media strategy to prevent public opinion from shifting in unexpected or unfavorable directions.
• Recognition activities through lectures: Avisptosis members themselves will host lecture meetings and participate in lecture meetings to conduct direct recognition activities.
• Implementation of open question responses: We will always accept questions about business content and questions about the GM chickens we handle, and respond sincerely.
• Publication of research content related to food safety verification: We will conduct test evaluations of the created GM chickens and food safety evaluations of eggs collected from GM chickens. The research content will be published sequentially to establish a system that allows consumers to obtain information immediately.

The third reason is that production and sales cannot begin without legal certification. Since the approval process differs depending on which region it is implemented in, we will engage with the regulatory bodies in the regions where implementation is planned.

• Tailored Safety Verification Methods: We will not finish with uniform safety verification alone, but will implement the safety verification methods required in each region. For that plan, we will have detailed discussions with governments in each region.
• Thorough submission of necessary information: We will submit required information sequentially and publish it appropriately on government sites.

First Potential Customer

To implement Cure Chicken as a product in society, it is important to determine the initial potential customers.

This time, we established the following conditions for identifying initial potential customers:

• Poultry farms in regions with significant HPAI damage
• Poultry farms in regions other than those with strict regulations on genetically modified foods

These two conditions differ by region in the world, so we conducted surveys for each region and identified which regions in the world the initial potential customers are located in.

Promising Market ① South America

1. Importance of HPAI countermeasures (Extremely high ★★★★★)
   Brazil and Argentina are among the world's leading chicken meat producers and exporters. The occurrence of HPAI is viewed as a matter of national economic security because it leads not only to a severe impact on the domestic economy but also directly to import bans from major export destinations. Therefore, the importance of countermeasures to prevent damage from HPAI is extremely high.
2. Legal difficulty of GM food implementation (Low ★☆☆☆☆)
   This is a region where cultivation of GM soybeans and others is thriving, and resistance from the government and producers to genetic modification technology is very small. Similarly, regarding GM animals as well, Argentina and others have introduced flexible review processes on a case-by-case basis, and there is a foundation for accepting new biotechnology [13].

Promising Market ② North America

1. Importance of HPAI countermeasures (Extremely high ★★★★★)
   In the United States, tens of millions of chickens have been lost due to HPAI outbreaks. In particular, the record-high spike in egg prices became a social problem and had a major impact on consumers' lives. The importance of countermeasures is at a very high level.
2. Legal difficulty of GM food implementation (Medium ★★☆☆☆)
   It is the largest producer and consumer of GM crops, and the FDA (U.S. Food and Drug Administration) has a track record of approving genome-edited pigs resistant to infectious diseases. Since an approval process and market for GM animals exist, if scientific safety and economic benefits can be demonstrated, there is a high likelihood of market entry.

Promising Market ③ Middle East

1. Importance of HPAI countermeasures (High ★★★★☆)
   In the Middle East, demand for chicken meat as a key protein source is increasing for religious reasons. Therefore, this is a vital region for implementing HPAI countermeasures to protect the poultry industry, which consequently drives high demand for such measures.
2. Legal difficulty of GM food implementation (Low ★☆☆☆☆)
   The UAE and Saudi Arabia are relatively tolerant of imported GM foods and permit distribution after establishing labeling obligations and other requirements. Nations with advanced biotechnology sectors like Israel also exist within the region, and resistance to advanced technology can be said to be generally low.

Promising Market ④ China

1. Importance of HPAI countermeasures (Extremely high ★★★★★)
   China is one of the world's largest chicken meat producers and consumers, and the poultry industry is enormous. However, HPAI virus has become endemic domestically, and the economic damage that sporadic outbreaks cause to the industry is immeasurable. Furthermore, cases of human infection such as H7N9 cases have been repeatedly reported, making it a public health threat as well. For this reason, the importance of countermeasures is positioned extremely highly at the national level.
2. Legal difficulty of GM food implementation (Medium ★★★☆☆)
   The Chinese government is strongly promoting research and development of GM technology as a national policy from the perspective of food security. It has approved commercial cultivation of GM crops, and political barriers to technology introduction are low.

Conclusion

Cure Chicken is considered to have high demand and implementation feasibility in South America, North America, the Middle East, and China. Therefore, poultry farms in these four regions that are positive about raising GM chickens and seeking strong HPAI countermeasures are considered the first potential customers.

At the research and development stage, if we prove that Cure Chicken has strong and stable HPAI resistance, Cure Chicken will become the MVP (Minimum Viable Product) of this business. With this MVP, we will engage with potential customers.

Japanese poultry farmers taught us that whether Cure Chicken is used by poultry farmers depends on whether the necessity of HPAI countermeasures outweighs the negative aspects of GM food. Since the necessity of HPAI countermeasures cannot be raised any further, it becomes important to focus our efforts on mitigating the negative perceptions of GM food mentioned above.

Distribution Plan

The distribution system for chicken breeding stock is already established worldwide and is monopolized by a few dominant international breeding companies. Under these circumstances, establishing a new distribution system in-house is extremely difficult.

Therefore, to achieve our Vision efficiently, we must utilize this existing distribution system. This necessity leads us to set M&A as our exit strategy.

R&D Plan

We developed a realistic research and development plan in consultation with stakeholders who have experience in bringing genome-edited foods to market and venture capitalist Dr. Tamiya.

We were informed that in the current environment, it is difficult to receive support from private investors for research extending beyond 10 years, so the basic research phase will be conducted at research institutions such as universities.

The research phase must be carried out at a research institution equipped to handle chickens and HPAI. In Japan, institutions like Tottori University meet this requirement. We have already consulted with avian influenza researchers at Tottori University and are scheduled to report experimental results and other findings after iGEM ends.

Part of the plan references Japanese businesses aiming to commercialize genome-edited eggs [14].

Basic Research Phase

Duration: 2026 – 2032

Required Funding (Research Costs): $20,000 per year

Funding Sources: Various university and national agencies, and aid from private companies.

• Cell Culture-Level Experimentation: We will evaluate the ability of the engineered protein to suppress viral proliferation at the cultured cell level.
• Chicken Line Acquisition: We will acquire a stable chicken line that reliably expresses the designed protein.
• Egg Acquisition: We will obtain eggs from the chickens produced during the chicken line acquisition stage.

Applied Research Phase

Duration: 2026 – 2032

Required Funding (Research & Personnel Costs): $600,000 USD annually

Funding Sources: Various university and national agencies, aid from private companies, and investment from sources such as Venture Capital (VC).

• Chicken Functionality Assessment: We will evaluate the functionality of the established chicken line, including assessments of egg-laying efficiency and overall health.
• Safety Verification: We will conduct safety verification tests for the eggs and chicken meat to confirm their suitability as food products.
• Patent Application Filing: We will prepare and file patent applications toward securing intellectual property rights.

Business Plan