27 February 2026
Enhancing plant immunity
Philip Carella is leading an opportunity seed project within our Programmable Plants opportunity space. His team is working to rewire plants’ immunity to better fight pathogens. We caught up with Philip to learn more.
What are you currently working on?
Our team is developing a modular and programmable platform for enhancing plant immunity. We’re taking inspiration from the vast diversity of defensive mechanisms that evolved across the tree of life to develop innovative strategies to combat plant diseases. Our work involves designing and implementing immune circuits from other natural kingdoms – bacterial, fungal, and animal – then generating a library of synthetic constructs and testing their efficacy against key crop pathogens in a model plant.
We’re particularly amazed by the molecular diversity of modular anti-phage immune systems in bacteria and archaea that make exciting candidates for engineering plants’ immunity against viruses. Our hope is to better protect crops against a host of pathogens, ultimately helping to safeguard the world’s food system.
What do you wish more people knew about your research area?
Many people assume that immunity is highly specialised and specific to the organism in question – and in many ways, it is – but there are actually very striking similarities between mechanisms evolving independently across the tree of life. This really hints that there are common underlying principles of organismal immunity that we can leverage to develop programmable immunity in plants.
Thinking beyond the immediate objectives of your ARIA project, if the technology you’re building is wildly successful, what’s the most ambitious or blue-sky application you could imagine for it in 15 years?
We’d like to rationally design and implement ‘plug and play’ immune circuits that could be integrated into a broad range of crops to protect against emerging pathogens, essentially rewiring plants’ immunity beyond the constraints of their evolutionary history. In a rapidly changing climate and an agricultural system under ever-increasing pressure, bolstering plants’ ability to fight off pathogens could vastly improve crop yields, ultimately moving the needle on food security.
Which book/film/TV show should people check out to understand your project or discipline more?
I’d highly recommend Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind, an animated film from 1984 and directed by Hayao Miyazaki. It’s a beautiful story about living systems, adaptation, and how there is much we can and should learn from the natural world, rather than simply trying to dominate it. That’s pretty close to how we think about our explorations into the vast diversity of immune systems that evolved on our planet.