ChordexBio Showcases Innovation in Artificial Intelligence for Agricultural Genomics at the 2026 UPLB Agrinnovation Marketplace

Against the theme "Harvesting Horizons: Philippine Innovations for Climate-Resilient and Inclusive Agri-Food Systems," Innovation Week 2026 opened as a national platform connecting research and technology development with enterprise creation, policy support, investment opportunities, and community adoption. This activity engages regional and international partners to promote knowledge exchange and collaborative innovation aligned with broader Southeast Asian development goals. Within that week, ChordexBio presented at the UPLB Agrinnovation Marketplace, the exhibition track dedicated to "Bridging Innovation and Adoption," showcasing its AI-driven platform for agricultural genomics.

ChordexBio's exhibit centered on guntingAI, an AI engine for CRISPR targetability discovery that works across whole genomes — including the unannotated, non-model agricultural species that are most relevant to Philippine farming but least served by existing tools. The exhibit was anchored by a dedicated guntingAI poster and a purpose-built exhibit website at Exhibit Map, designed for the Innovation Week audience.

A national platform for agricultural innovation

Innovation Week 2026 aimed to bridge the gap between what Philippine research produces and what the agricultural sector actually adopts. The Agrinnovation Marketplace embodied that bridging: an exhibition of selected agritechnologies from universities and state universities and colleges (SUCs), government-supported projects, and industry partners such as startups and enterprises with ready or near-market solutions, and practical innovations addressing productivity, resilience, and value chain gaps.

For ChordexBio, the Marketplace was the right venue at the right moment — as the Philippines intensifies its effort across three fronts that guntingAI directly engages:

• Agricultural innovation. A growing national focus on homegrown R&D moving beyond yield-only metrics toward genomics-informed breeding, precision trait discovery, and data-driven crop improvement. These are areas where AI can compress discovery timelines.
• Intellectual property protection. Strengthening the IP framework around agricultural innovations so that Filipino-developed technologies, including AI platforms and genomic tools, can be protected, scaled, and commercialized on home soil rather than ceded to foreign interests.
• Commercialization. Bridging the gap between research output and market-ready products, ensuring that laboratory advances reach farmers, breeders, and agribusinesses who need them.

The establishment of UPLB's Agricultural Genomics Research Center (AGRC) signals how seriously the institutional side of this push is being taken. A dedicated center for agricultural genomics, built at the country's flagship agricultural university. This reflects a structural commitment to building domestic capacity in a field that underpins crop improvement, disease resistance, and climate resilience.

These are not incremental shifts. The AGRC's formation, the simultaneous push toward IP protection and commercialization, and the convening of Innovation Week itself all point to a recognition that the Philippines cannot remain a consumer of agricultural technology alone — it must become a producer of it. The Agrinnovation Marketplace was, in that sense, both a display of what that production already looks like and a signal of what it is becoming.

Why guntingAI is relevant to this moment

Agricultural genomics in the Philippines faces a structural bottleneck: most crop genomes, especially the locally important, understudied varieties lack the annotation depth that commercial CRISPR design tools and AI platforms require. Existing tools are built for model organisms and well-annotated reference genomes but they struggle with the very species that matter most to Philippine agriculture.

guntingAI was designed for exactly this gap. It trains on whole-genome sequence data without requiring prior annotation, enabling CRISPR targetability discovery across unannotated and underserved genomes. For a country building its agricultural genomics capacity from the ground up — through the AGRC and the broader innovation ecosystem Innovation Week represents — that is not a convenience. It is a prerequisite.

The relevance cuts deeper than technical capability. When a national research infrastructure is being built, the tools that infrastructure adopts shape what it can discover, whom it can serve, and how quickly it can deliver. An annotation-dependent toolchain limits the scope of inquiry to already-studied genomes; an annotation-agnostic one extends it to the genomes Philippine breeders and researchers are actually working with. And guntingAI is built for the latter.

This is also why the timing matters. A national platform like Innovation Week — one that explicitly connects R&D with enterprise creation, policy support, investment, and community adoption — is the kind of environment where a tool like guntingAI can find its audience: researchers who need to discover targets in genomes that commercial tools cannot handle, institutions that are building capacity and want tools that grow with them, and partners who see the value in a Filipino-built AI platform that addresses an underserved layer of the agricultural value chain.

A broader landscape of AI innovation at the Marketplace

ChordexBio's presence at the Agrinnovation Marketplace was part of a larger showcase of artificial intelligence driving agricultural advancement in the country. The exhibitor list for Innovation Week 2026 made the point plainly: AI had moved from a side conversation in Philippine agriculture to a visible, multi-vendor presence at the country's flagship agritech exhibition.

View the institutions here

What distinguishes guntingAI within this landscape is its position at the genomic layer: the foundational level where trait discovery begins. AI tools that operate downstream — on disease detection from images, on precision farming automation, on crop monitoring and forecasting — are already transforming on-farm and supply-chain decision-making. But the upstream question of "which genomic targets are worth pursuing in the first place" is increasingly AI-addressable too, and guntingAI is built to answer it for the genomes Philippine agriculture actually depends on. The presence of multiple AI innovators at the Marketplace — spanning field operations, post-harvest grading, crop monitoring, and genomics — suggests a growing convergence between the country's agricultural challenges and a homegrown AI ecosystem capable of addressing them at multiple layers at once.

The exhibit

At the Agrinnovation Marketplace, ChordexBio showcased a dedicated guntingAI poster — presenting the platform's architecture, its trainability on any genome, and its role in making CRISPR targetability discovery accessible for non-model and unannotated agricultural species.

The exhibit was anchored by a purpose-built Agrinnovation exhibit website at agrinnovation.chordexbio.com, designed specifically for the Innovation Week audience. The site introduces guntingAI in the context of Philippine agricultural innovation, explains why annotation-free genomic AI matters for local crops, and provides a point of contact for researchers, institutions, and partners who want to engage with the platform.

Strengthening the country's agricultural sector

The central argument for guntingAI at the Agrinnovation Marketplace is straightforward: the Philippines is investing in the institutions, the legal framework, the commercial pathways, and the national platform to build a stronger agricultural sector. Innovation Week 2026 is itself evidence of that investment. AI for agricultural genomics is one of the technologies that can make those investments return faster and farther — by enabling genomic discovery in the crops that matter locally, by supporting Filipino researchers and breeders with tools that work on their genomes rather than on someone else's, and by contributing to a domestic capability that is protectable, commercializable, and scalable.

ChordexBio's participation in the 2026 UPLB Agrinnovation Marketplace is a visible step in that direction: a Filipino AI company showing up at a national platform for agricultural innovation, with a tool built for the genomic layer that the country's agricultural genomics capacity is only expediting to build.