5 companies advancing ATTR assets in the wake of Wainua’s fail

 

The Phase 3 failure of AstraZeneca and Ionis Pharmaceuticals’ antisense therapy in transthyretin amyloid cardiomyopathy last month left the space reeling—and readjusting. BioSpace looks at five contenders and where they currently stand.

A pillar of the transthyretin amyloidosis space was shaken last month when AstraZeneca and Ionis Pharmaceuticals’ antisense drug Wainua failed to show significant cardiovascular benefit in a late-stage trial of patients with transthyretin amyloid cardiomyopathy, otherwise known as ATTR-CM.

The Phase 3 flop sent waves across the ATTR space, appearing as an overhang for other developers of similar therapies, while simultaneously boosting those taking alternative approaches to this rare and progressive condition.

Part of the reason the failure was so surprising is that Wainua is already approved to treat transthyretin amyloid polyneuropathy (ATTR-PN).

Affecting around six in a million people in the U.S., ATTR occurs when a protein called transthyretin becomes unstable and misfolds, ultimately depositing as amyloid plaques in various organs across the body.

In ATTR, there are two big “clinical buckets,” ATTR-CM and ATTR-PN, according to Faisal Khurshid, managing director of biotechnology equity research at Jefferies. However, “The same biology manifests very differently depending on where the amyloid is causing the most damage,” he told BioSpace in an email.

ATTR-CM refers to cardiovascular symptoms that arise as amyloid builds up in the heart, causing symptoms of heart failure, while in ATTR-PN, amyloid clumps in peripheral nerves lead to the numbing of the extremities, diarrhea and other symptoms.

Of the two, ATTR-CM is the “much larger” market opportunity, Khurshid said. Indeed, a December 2025 study published in Open Heart showed that 12.7 out of one million people have ATTR-CM, while only 3.5 per million have ATTR-PN.

There can be advantages to targeting ATTR-PN first, however, because this approach can validate biology, Khurshid said, “and in some cases provide a first commercial foothold before [ATTR-CM].”

That was the hope for Wainua, which was first approved in December 2023 for hereditary ATTR-PN. The Phase 3 CARDIO-TTRansform trial was intended to establish the drug in ATTR-CM. With its failure, AstraZeneca and Ionis are unlikely to file for approval in this indication, analysts said.

“ATTR is mechanistically one disease but clinically not one disease,” Khurshid said, explaining why some therapies succeed in one ATTR subtype but not the other. “A drug can be mechanistically rational across ATTR but still show very different clinical results depending on the organ involved, baseline disease stage, endpoint sensitivity, and background therapy.”

The Phase 3 Wainua failure in ATTR-CM leaves in its wake “a highly evolving landscape” of ATTR treatment, Khurshid said—one with many players, but which must also now contend with “big questions” on what will constitute a successful trial in the indication.

BioSpace takes stock of the field here.

AstraZeneca persists with first-in-class candidate

AstraZeneca continues to forge ahead in the ATTR-CM arena with the transthyretin depleter cliramitug.

Originally developed by Neurimmune, cliramitug is an investigational antibody that targets the disease-causing amyloid clumps found in the heart, triggering their removal from the body, according to the biotech’s website. Cliramitug has the potential to be the first agent that not only slows disease progression but also depletes amyloid buildup from the heart, per Neurimmune.

Attracted by this promise, AstraZeneca—through its rare disease outfit Alexion—paid $30 million upfront in 2022 to secure an exclusive global license to develop and commercialize cliramitug. The pharma also put up to $730 million on the line in potential milestone payments.

Long-term data from a first-in-human trial published last month in Nature Medicine showed that continued cliramitug treatment through a median follow-up of nearly 30 months led to sustained reductions in cardiac amyloid burden and biomarker improvements. Outcomes even improved over time in patients who had low initial exposure to cliramitug before doses were ramped up.

There were no serious adverse events or study dropouts related to cliramitug.

AstraZeneca is currently running the Phase 3 placebo-controlled DepleTTR-CM trial of cliramitug, with nearly 1,200 patients enrolled. The study’s primary completion date is around mid-2027, according to a federal clinical trials database.

Novo Nordisk, Prothena deplete problematic proteins with coramitug

Racing against AstraZeneca to bring the first transthyretin depleter to the market is Novo Nordisk, which last year pushed into late-stage development with its investigational therapy coramitug.

Initially developed by Prothena Corp., coramitug is an antibody therapy that specifically targets dysfunctional and misfolded proteins that would otherwise form pathologic clumps, according to the biotech’s website. Coramitug targets deposited amyloid to remove plaques and circulating amyloid to prevent further aggregation.

In July 2021, Novo paid $100 million upfront and earmarked up to $1.2 billion in milestones to take over Prothena’s ATTR business—including coramitug.

Phase 2 data published in November 2025 demonstrated a significant reduction in NT-proBNP levels—a biomarker of heart health—in patients with ATTR-CM taking coramitug versus placebo comparators at 52 weeks. The drug showed no significant benefit on the 6-minute walk test, a measure of exercise capacity and endurance.

Novo has nevertheless decided to advance coramitug into Phase 3 studies. The pharma is running the late-stage CLEOPATTRA trial in ATTR-CM, with a primary completion date in mid-2029. The study is currently recruiting patients.

In April, the FDA granted coramitug its Fast Track designation for ATTR-CM, which will expedite the drug’s review once an application has been accepted.

Alnylam’s nucresiran weathers headwinds for silencers

Caught in the downdraft of Wainua’s late-stage stumble is Alnylam’s next-generation ATTR-CM drug nucresiran, an RNA interference therapy that works by suppressing expression of the transthyretin protein, ultimately preventing the pathologic buildup of misfolded versions.

The Wainua failure “raises questions” about nucresiran, another transthyretin silencer, Truist Securities wrote in a July 9 note. In particular, analysts noted that the disappointing outcome raises uncertainties about whether nucresiran could elicit sufficient therapeutic benefit in patients with ATTR-CM amid the current dominance background stabilizer therapy.

In November 2024, Alnylam announced that a 300-mg dose of nucresiran elicited an average reduction of 90.3% in serum transthyretin levels at day 15 in a Phase 1 trial. This effect improved to 96.5% at day 29 before mellowing to 92.6% at day 180. Figures were comparable, if a bit higher, for the 600-mg and 900-mg doses.

Nucresiran is being studied in the Phase 3 TRITON-PN trial for ATTR-PN, with initial data expected in 2027. Alnylam is also running the Phase 3 TRITON-CM study of the asset in ATTR-CM, with primary completion in 2030.

The company said in January that it hopes to launch nucresiran in ATTR-PN by 2028 and in ATTR-CM by 2030.

Aside from nucresiran, Alnylam owns Amvuttra, first approved in June 2022 for hereditary ATTR-PN and then in March 2025 for ATTR-CM. The drug made $890 million in the first quarter of this year.

Intellia takes a gene therapy approach with nex-z

Intellia Therapeutics is taking a similar approach to Wainua and nucresiran, only with a gene therapy. With nexiguran ziclumeran (nex-z), the Massachusetts biotech seeks to lower the overall expression levels of the transthyretin protein.

The asset is being studied in the Phase 3 MAGNITUDE and MAGNITUDE-2 studies for ATTR-CM and ATTR-PN, respectively. Initial data from these two trials could come as soon as the latter half of 2027. Phase 1 data revealed in November 2025 showed that a one-time infusion of nex-z elicited and maintained long-term serum transthyretin reductions. In nine patients followed for 36 months, transthyretin levels were 87% lower on average versus baseline.

Safety, however, seems to be a key concern for nex-z. In 2022, Intellia detected a case of significantly elevated liver enzymes in a Phase 1 study of the therapy, though the patient remained asymptomatic and the episode was “deemed nonserious by the investigator,” the company said at the time. Such a signal appeared again in May last year, with the biotech reporting another case of asymptomatic liver enzyme elevation.

A few months later, in October 2025, the FDA paused both MAGNITUDE and MAGNITUDE-2 after another liver safety issue. This time, the patient needed to be hospitalized. The agency has since released its hold on these trials after Intellia agreed to certain protocol adjustments and stricter safety monitoring strategies.

BridgeBio’s Attruby riding high

For other contenders in the ATTR arena, the Phase 3 failure of Wainua may have removed a formidable competitor. This is the case for BridgeBio, which owns the oral drug acoramidis, sold under the brand name Attruby.

Unlike the transthyretin silencers Wainua and nucresiran, acoramidis is known as a transthyretin stabilizer. Instead of reducing the overall expression levels of the protein, acoramidis instead binds to transthyretin and slows its degeneration, which otherwise would result in the formation of disease-causing plaques.

Acoramidis was approved in 2024 for ATTR-CM.

BridgeBio continues to beef up Attruby’s profile. In May, the biotech presented data from a follow-on analysis of its Phase 3ATTRibute-CM trial. These new findings showed that the drug reduced cardiovascular hospitalization by 34% in ATTR-CM patients as compared with its biggest competitor, Pfizer’s Vyndaqel/Vyndamax, also a transthyretin stabilizer.

All-cause mortality, meanwhile, dropped by 28% in patients on Attruby versus Vyndaqel/Vyndamax, though this benefit was not statistically significant. This additional analysis only indirectly compared the two drugs, and there have been no head-to-head studies pitting the two products against each other.

BridgeBio is also studying Attruby for the prevention of ATTR-CM and ATTR-PN in asymptomatic people who carry pathogenic mutations. The Phase 3 ACT-EARLY trial is ongoing, with primary completion in 2031.

https://www.biospace.com/drug-development/5-companies-advancing-attr-assets-in-the-wake-of-wainuas-fail

Google Earth risked ruin with retracted AI tool for making fake satellite pics

Google briefly allowed anyone to create AI-modified versions of satellite imagery available in Google Earth—before quickly reversing its decision as people shared examples of AI-generated pictures that illustrated the potential for misinformation and disinformation.

There is no shortage of generative AI tools that already allow people to create AI-modified images of real buildings and cities based on user prompts. But Google’s aborted attempt to incorporate its Nano Banana 2 AI image generator as a Google Earth feature made it even easier for anyone to create modified versions of authentic imagery depicting real locations—something that Google boasted about when initially promoting the new feature.

“For the first time, you can generate custom images using Google Earth’s satellite, aerial, and 3D imagery alongside Nano Banana, which creates concepts grounded in the real world,” wrote Bryan Horowitz, product manager for Google Earth, in a company blog post on July 30.

That possibility deeply alarmed researchers, who often use Google Earth to help verify images and videos of locations at a time when AI-generated misinformation and disinformation have become rampant online. They showed how the new feature could simplify the process of creating false scenarios overlaid on Google Earth’s photorealistic imagery.

“Google Earth, a tool often used as a source of satellite imagery to verify photos and videos, has added a feature that allows you to alter satellite imagery with AI, for reasons,” wrote Eliot Higgins, founder of the independent investigative organization Bellingcat, in a Bluesky post responding to the AI feature’s debut.

“No way this could be abused,” Higgins added sarcastically in a follow-up post that featured an AI-modified image made in Google Earth showing a giant golden statue of President Donald Trump looming over the White House.

Within a day, Google announced on the social media platform X that it was rolling back the feature. Shortly afterward, Ars checked and found that the feature was inaccessible to Google Earth users.


Before removing the AI feature, Google had touted its potential to allow Google Earth users to depict completed real estate projects or enable teachers and students to transform the modern-day ruins of Pompeii into a “hyper-realistic view” of what the town looked like in 78 CE under the Roman Empire. But independent researchers immediately gravitated toward the potential for misuse.

“Tonight I typed just one sentence into Google Earth and put refugees near the Mexican border,” wrote Henk van Ess, an independent investigator, in an extensive blog post detailing his concerns on July 30. “Then I planted a nuclear plant in Iran. Then I put a fatal crash on a street in Amsterdam. Google’s own satellite imagery underneath all three. What on earth is Google doing?”
Checking for misinformation

Ess pointed to a previous example of AI-generated misinformation gone viral that used a Google Earth satellite photo of the US Navy’s Fifth Fleet headquarters in Manama, Bahrain. A forger had prompted Google’s Gemini AI assistant to transform a screenshot of that Google Earth image into a false image depicting the aftermath of an Iranian drone strike on the US military base.

The same process that might have taken about six steps could be done “in seconds” with the AI tool built into Google Earth, Ess said.

Before eventually removing the Google Earth feature, Google initially responded to Ess by highlighting its SynthID system that automatically embeds digital watermarks in images generated by Google’s AI tools.

“We take misinformation seriously—every image created with Nano Banana in Google Earth includes the SynthID digital watermark, so if someone is unsure about an image, they can ask the Gemini app or use Lens in Search to see if the image was AI-generated,” according to Google’s post on X on July 30. “In addition, we prevent image creation on harmful topics and are continually updating our protections.”

Previous Ars testing of Google’s SynthID system has shown that Google’s digital watermark can persist despite substantial image edits and data loss. However, Ars also encountered the issue of SynthID limiting image checks to about 10 per day.

When Ars prompted Google’s Gemini app to run a SynthID check on several AI-modified images generated within Google Earth—before Google removed the Google Earth feature—Gemini responded that it had “detected digital watermarking indicating that part or all of this image was generated or edited using Google AI tools.”

But Ess questioned why Google’s policy on preventing the creation of AI-generated images on harmful topics had not stopped him from depicting scenes such as a hospital with a bomb crater in Gaza. He also expressed skepticism about primarily relying on Google’s SynthID watermarking system and Google’s AI tools for verifying whether an image is AI-generated.

“Fakes do not travel as clean files with their credentials intact,” Ess wrote. “They travel as screen recordings, re-encodes, screenshots of screenshots, filmed off somebody’s phone in a hurry.”

Indeed, Google’s SynthID was unable to provide any image verification when Ars used a smartphone camera to take a photo of an AI-altered image made using the Google Earth feature.

Undermining trust

By introducing an AI image generator as a Google Earth feature, Google risked undermining public trust in Google Earth as a reliable reference for providing authentic imagery of the real world, Ess said. It could have also handed an additional excuse to government officials or anyone who wants to deny genuine satellite photos by claiming they were modified or generated entirely by AI tools.

Giving anyone access to an easy tool to create AI-modified satellite imagery could have also made it even harder for journalists and researchers checking misinformation and disinformation. Ess recommended using multiple sources to verify satellite imagery and relying on constantly updated satellite imagery sources such as Europe’s Copernicus Sentinel-2.

Google may have alleviated immediate concerns by deciding to quickly remove the AI tool within Google Earth—but its statement suggested that the company could eventually bring the feature back in the future.

“We’ve seen geospatial professionals using this feature for a range of useful purposes, however we’ve also seen people sharing screenshots of generated imagery that appear to violate our policies,” according to the Google statement. “So we’re rolling back this feature in Google Earth while we work on implementing stronger guardrails.”

https://arstechnica.com/ai/2026/07/google-earth-releases-swiftly-retracts-ai-feature-to-make-fake-satellite-images/

Americans Searching for Meaning In All the Wrong Places

by Allan J. Feifer 

Humans require meaningful struggle, sometimes intensive struggle, to achieve their potential. When societies attempt to eliminate the essential struggle for survival, people must voluntarily assume responsibility, something they’re frequently unwilling to do. If they don’t, they invent artificial alternative struggles.

Governments too often accelerate that process by subsidizing dependency and insulating people from the consequences of their actions. The result is social policy that rewards the wrong behaviors, to the detriment of society but to the advantage of some politicians.

Consider how simple life is for those who wake up hungry each day in parts of the developing world. Their daily mission is brutally clear: feed the family, avoid violence, and survive another day.

Thanks largely to the spread of market capitalism—and aided by America’s unmatched tradition of private philanthropy—fewer people live in extreme poverty today than at any point in recorded human history. Virtually no one in the Western world faces that kind of existence. That is unquestionably good. Yet the disappearance of natural struggle also removes the forces that once compelled people to develop discipline, responsibility, and resilience.

Prosperity itself isn’t the problem. Prosperity without responsibility is.

Throughout history, people found meaning through faith, family, productive work, sacrifice, community, and raising children according to moral principles. These voluntary burdens replaced the burdens of survival while producing stable and prosperous civilizations. When people abandon those responsibilities, they rarely stop searching for meaning. They simply begin looking for it in all the wrong places.

America offers perhaps the clearest illustration of this principle in the modern world.

Over several generations, the government has steadily assumed responsibilities once carried by families, churches, neighborhoods, and voluntary associations. Each new promise has come with a hidden cost: fewer opportunities—and fewer expectations—for individuals to solve their own problems. As government expands, the institutions that cultivate responsibility steadily weaken.

Millions of healthy young adults delay marriage, postpone careers, remain financially dependent upon parents, and drift through extended adolescence. Rather than assuming adult responsibilities, many continue to search for their identity well into their thirties and beyond.

Church membership has fallen sharply over the past several decades, with a parallel increase in loneliness and anxiety. Institutions that once provided purpose, discipline, and community continue to weaken while government increasingly attempts to fill the void.

Politics has ceased to be merely a means of governing. For millions, it has become a primary source of identity and purpose, turning every election into an existential struggle and every political disagreement into a moral crusade.

Identity politics, perpetual outrage, tribalism, social media activism, class envy, and victimhood are artificial struggles created to fill the void left by the disappearance of genuine daily struggle. The point is not left versus right. The point is that people who no longer find meaning in productive lives often seek it through symbolic, but ultimately meaningless, conflict.

History repeatedly demonstrates this pattern. Post-war Britain’s expanding welfare state fostered growing dependence upon government while gradually eroding habits of initiative and self-reliance.

The Soviet Union took the process much further, producing what scholars called Homo Sovieticus—citizens conditioned to be passive, resentful, and incapable of self-direction. Different societies, different systems, the same lesson: when governments assume responsibilities individuals should bear themselves, the human capacity for self-government steadily atrophies.

One of my most important rules is simple: whatever you subsidize, you get more of.

Subsidize work, and you encourage work. Subsidize investment, and you encourage investment. The corollary: subsidize dependency, and you inevitably create more dependency. America has the largest dependent class it has ever seen, and it’s growing, not shrinking.

America’s current political and social turmoil is a direct consequence of a government that has grown far beyond its constitutional restraints and intended purpose. It promises more than it can possibly deliver and, in doing so, dehumanizes millions who become increasingly frustrated, angry, and disillusioned. Government interference increasingly displaces the institutions that once rewarded effort, family formation, devotion to moral norms, and adherence to the natural law principles that developed over centuries.

Or, as Zohran Mamdani proudly declared: “We will replace the frigidity of rugged individualism with the warmth of collectivism.”

That statement should chill every freedom-loving American to the bone because collectivism does not eliminate struggle. It merely transfers responsibility from individuals to the government while concentrating power in the hands of political elites whose goals rarely align with those of the people they subjugate.

Throughout history, consequences have taught lessons that lectures never could. Modern governments increasingly shield people from the consequences of their own destructive choices. Predictably, those choices become more common. Permanent welfare erodes the human impulse to solve problems. It gradually reduces people to a kind of custodial existence—not unlike zoo animals: fed, sheltered, protected, yet deprived of agency, initiative, and purpose.

Government is not our savior; it frequently reveals itself as our destroyer. It should be treated like a fire alarm: kept under glass with the label, “Break Glass in Case of Emergency.” Government policy is often wrong, and the most expensive solution is frequently the one adopted first. Dependency, family breakdown, fraud, bureaucratic expansion, and declining civic responsibility are too often treated as unfortunate side effects when, in fact, they are predictable consequences of policies that reward dependence over independence.

Civilization cannot permanently replace hardship with comfort, responsibility with entitlement, or purpose with politics. Human nature does not disappear simply because society becomes wealthier. If people no longer struggle to survive, they must willingly choose the harder path of responsibility. If they refuse, they will manufacture conflicts to fill the vacuum.

Prosperity is among civilization’s greatest achievements. But prosperity alone cannot satisfy the human soul. Unless it is accompanied by responsibility, faith, family, productive work, and voluntary sacrifice, people will search for meaning elsewhere. America’s cultural turmoil is not simply the product of bad policy. It is a prosperous civilization searching for meaning in all the wrong places—and one that will never find it there.

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2026/08/americans-are-searching-for-meaning-in-all-the-wrong-places/

Homelessness in California is a national security problem, too

 Angelenos were rightly alarmed to learn last month that the number of homeless people is rising again. But the reality is even worse. Homelessness is no longer just a local issue. It is a national security problem.

A significant number of the people living in tents on California’s sidewalks are not there because they lost a paycheck. They are there because they are addicted to a chemical weapon manufactured in China, smuggled through Mexico by cartels the United States has now designated as Foreign Terrorist Organizations, and delivered through the same California ports and highways that carry the rest of our economy.

The state’s own data tell the story. Overdose is now the leading cause of death for unhoused Californians. In San Francisco, fentanyl is present in the majority of overdose deaths on the street. 

LA County Public Health reports the same. Behavioral health surveys consistently find roughly one in three unhoused Californians admits to regular illicit drug use, and independent researchers put the real number significantly higher when methamphetamine and fentanyl are counted together.

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Andy Johnstone for CA Post

Where do the drugs come from?

They come from China. Chinese chemical companies in Guangzhou, Wuhan, and Shandong manufacture the precursor chemicals that Mexican cartels cook into finished fentanyl. 

The State Department sanctioned Guangzhou Tengyue Chemical last September and accused Beijing of “actively sustaining and expanding the business of poisoning our communities.” 

That is the U.S. government formally accusing a foreign adversary of running a chemical warfare campaign against Americans, and the finished product from that campaign is what is killing our neighbors on Skid Row, in the Tenderloin, and along the Santa Ana riverbed.

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David Buchan for Ca Post

The Sinaloa Cartel and Jalisco New Generation Cartel (CJNG), both now designated Foreign Terrorist Organizations by the Trump administration, run the industrial synthesis operations on the Pacific coast of Mexico.

Chinese money launderers wash the proceeds back through LAs real estate, Bay Area shell companies, and West Coast underground banking. Every step in that chain is a national security issue, and every step runs directly into California.

Now stand on a sidewalk in downtown Los Angeles and ask what any of that has to do with a tent on the corner.

Everything.

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David Buchan for Ca Post

The person inside that tent is very often the last customer in a supply chain that began in a Chinese chemical plant and passed through a designated terrorist organization. 

Sacramento’s response has been to build housing around that person, hand out naloxone, and hope the addiction burns itself out. It does not, because the supply does not stop, because Sacramento is not fighting the supply. Washington is.

Two sets of numbers came out this month that make the case.

Fentanyl overdose deaths in the U.S. fell 22 percent in a single year, from 48,913 in 2024 to 38,084 in 2025, according to the White House and the Office of the Director of National Intellignce (ODNI). LA County overdose deaths dropped from a peak of 3,220 in 2022 to 2,298 in 2025. The ODNI directly credited “disruptions to the production supply chain.”

California’s homelessness problem is going the other direction. The city of LA is up 3.4 percent. Unsheltered homelessness — people living on the streets or in cars — is up 7.9 percent.

Federal enforcement is pulling down the death rate. California housing policy is not pulling down the tent count. If Sacramento’s theory of the case were right, both numbers would be moving together. They are not.

Sacramento is treating a foreign attack as a social service problem. The Port of Long Beach and the Port of Los Angeles together handle roughly 40 percent of the containerized freight entering the U.S. The I-5 corridor carries northbound traffic from Tijuana to Portland. Every port container that is waved customer through is potentially part of a supply line that ends in a tent on Alvarado Street.

Every unhoused Californian is somebody’s child. Many are veterans. Many are victims of untreated mental illness. Many are victims of an addiction that a foreign adversary put in a Mexican cartel’s hands and shipped up to their neighborhood. 

All of that can be true at once. What cannot be true at once is that you fix this crisis without fighting the supply chain.

Homelessness is a housing story. It is a mental health story. It is a poverty story. And it is a national security story too.

You cannot solve any of them without solving all of them.

Lisa Daftari is a foreign policy analyst and media commentator based in Los Angeles.

https://nypost.com/2026/08/02/opinion/homelessness-is-a-national-security-problem-too/

'Mamdani contract to turn felons to gourmet-food producers for ‘farm-to-table’ dining at NYC jails'

 The Mamdani administration is launching a new program to turn felons into gourmet-food producers and offer “farm-to-table’’ dining for inmates.

The New York City Correction Department has awarded a nearly $230,000 annual contract to a Colorado-based firm, FarmBox Foods, to teach inmates — or “persons in custody” — at Rikers Island and other municipal jails how to “vertical” farm in an urban setting.

“The purpose of this agreement is to procure a Vertical Hydroponic Farm for Persons-inCustody (PICs) to develop a skill that can be utilized when being released from custody,” the Correction Department said in a public notice announcing the award.

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New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani spoke with Rikers Island inmates during a World Cup match on July 15.AP Photo/Seth Wenig

“The Department of Correction seeks to revitalize its Workforce Development Unit to include new and innovative trades and skill building classes that directly relate to re-entry and reduced recidivism.

“Based on an evaluation of potential trades and skills that are felony friendly, DOC believes that there is a gap in services as it pertains to urban agriculture, community gardening, local and small business entrepreneurship, local and small business perspectives, and culinary arts,” the agency’s notice said.

The food grown on the farm will be used to provide healthy, “farm-to-table” food options for inmate meals.

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FarmBox Foods, a Colorado-based company, will begin teaching Rikers Island inmates about “vertical” farming.FarmBox Foods

FarmBox Foods previously launched a vertical farm at the Coleman Low Federal Correctional Institution in Florida.

“The farm produces high volumes of nutritious food and readies the adults in custody for release, equipping them with a skill set that can contribute to their community while reducing the likelihood of recidivism,” the firm says on its website.

Vertical hydroponic farming is a method where crops grow in stacked, vertical layers without soil.

Plant roots receive minerals and water through a circulating nutrient-rich water solution, and LED grow lights ensure plants receive adequate light when produced indoors.

FarmBox Foods’ controlled-climate Vertical Hydroponic Farm can simultaneously grow more than 7,000 plants.

Housed in pre-insulated shipping containers, these boxes grow leafy greens, herbs, peppers, small tomatoes, micro greens and tree seedlings, among other vegetables.

“Production occurs near your consumer, reducing food miles, alleviating supply chain issues and preserving shelf life,” FarmBox Foods says on its website.

The system is equipped with sensors & software to control all climate conditions, including temperature, humidity, watering schedule, lighting, air exchange, pH levels and nutrient concentration.

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FarmBox Foods aims to allow inmates to “contribute to their community” by growing vegetables in the Vertical Hydroponic Farm.FarmBox Foods

Another benefit: Pests and weeds aren’t an issue since there’s no soil — as long as the system is cleaned regularly.

Vertical hydroponic farming also uses substantially less water than an outdoor, soil-based farm.

The Correction Department said it’s eager to provide convicted or accused criminals in custody a valuable skill when they re-enter society.

“We have a therapeutic horticulture program. We plan on expanding the program with potential for workforce-readiness,” a DOC rep said.

DOC Commissioner Stanley Richards, who was incarcerated at Rikers as a young man, is a booster of the horticulture program and has visited the existing outdoor gardens tended to by inmates at Rikers.

The agency awarded FarmBox Foods a one-year contract for $228,000, with an option to renew.

“FarmBox Foods is the sole manufacturer and exclusive source of its proprietary products,” the agency said.

“All FarmBox Foods units are exclusively designed, engineered, and fabricated in the United States, and are sold directly by FarmBox Foods. Therefore, DOC has determined that proceeding with FarmBox Foods LLC as the sole source provider is in the best interest of the City.”

The massive Rikers Island jail complex will be phased out and replaced by new borough-based jails over the next five years.

https://nypost.com/2026/08/02/us-news/nyc-launches-program-to-turn-felons-into-farmers/