Startups in any industry often have great ideas and new ways of taking on existing challenges. The billions invested in ag startups are starting to show benefits, and with that come collaborations and partnerships. Recently, crop protection company Nufarm announced it had made an investment in Enko as a way to ramp up discovery of new chemistries.

Jacqueline Heard, CEO, Enko, talked with Farm Progress about the collaboration, and the work Enko is doing that takes a different approach to crop protection product discovery and got Nufarm's attention. Heard is a veteran in agriculture with work at Monsanto who later went out on her own. She was involved in the development of DroughtGard, and admits her team had a role in Monsanto's purchase of The Climate Corporation, a move that many say kicked off the massive investment in ag startups.

Always considering herself an entrepreneur, Heard got involved with a venture capital group after leaving Monsanto and saw how digital agronomy was having an impact on agriculture. "While I was doing that, I started to think about one of the most important industries to agriculture, which in my opinion is crop protection," Heard recalls. "Pests and diseases can cut crop yields in half, and these products are a necessity, not an option for producers."

The challenge Heard saw, and one that Nufarm was watching, too, is that 80% of the crop protection products in use today are off-patent, and they compete solely on price. And another 22 products will come off patent by 2030. "All of this points to the fact that the industry needs innovation, and new solutions for farmers," Heard says.

Crop protection molecule discovery is a laborious task, and Heard knew how it works. Companies develop or acquire chemical libraries from a variety of sources and expose them to weeds, insects and diseases to test what might work as a control agent. Companies have automated the process and can test 50,000 to 75,000 molecules a year. Often this is a "binary" selection process — if the weed, insect or disease dies, that molecule moves further down the pipeline.

Heard notes with that process safety testing comes after proof of efficacy, which means in many cases a “hot” molecule and the time to test it might be wasted if the safety profile is unacceptable. Heard knew there had to be a better way to explore what prevents companies from moving ahead with new modes of action.

Rethinking molecule discovery

Heard turned to the world of drug discovery in the pharmaceutical industry, where finding new ways to treat diseases has been fine-tuned using innovative techniques. And that's when Enko's developers developed a technique that brings many more molecule candidates forward, but in a way that allows for safety testing up front.

"The beauty of this is that we don't need an infrastructure of automated testing labs," she says. "We can deconstruct a molecule easily and know how it will work."

Essentially using a DNA library, the company can find molecules that are very focused on the targeted pest – insect, weed or disease. That targeting means that the molecule discovered is more likely to have fewer off-target safety risks and that's known earlier than conventional approaches.

The process also offers a much wider library of candidates. "We can test 140 billion compounds for a specific target," she says. "We have access to massive chemical diversity all designed to be drug-like capable of acting on biological targets." She adds that if you used the conventional lab approach described above to screen the number of molecules Enko has available it would take 60,000 years to screen the compounds.

"The real beauty of this technology is that we can go find molecules that are selective, or designed to overcome resistance," she says. And the development process is faster since the safety is considered in parallel with molecule development, cutting the time it takes to get from the lab into the field.

The Nufarm collaboration will work to bring Enko products to market that, combined with Nufarm, existing products could extend their valuable life. But Enko could also be bringing totally new compounds to market in the future and leverage the Nufarm distribution system — which startups often lack.

Learn more about Enko at enkochem.com, where the company explains more about its process.