INDIANAPOLIS – A two-year research agreement that may lead to additional uses of the insect control product spinosad has been announced. The agreement is between pest management company Dow AgroSciences LLC and BIOTICA Technology Ltd., a biopharmaceutical company.
Spinosad controls a variety of insect pests, including caterpillars, thrips, flies, drywood termites and some beetles. It is derived through the fermentation of a naturally occurring organism. Products in the U.S. containing the active ingredient spinosad include Tracer™ Naturalyte™ insect control, Success™ Naturalyte™ insect control, SpinTor™ Naturalyte™ insect control and Conserve™ insect control.
Under the terms of the agreement BIOTICA will determine the potential for obtaining additional variants of spinosad by targeted changes of the biosynthetic pathway that creates this product. This partnership complements ongoing efforts by Dow AgroSciences to generate a variety of spinosad related products.
"The application … should help us target additional insect pests and help meet the enormous customer demand for spinosad," said Dave Morris, global business leader of Spinosad.
Peter Leadlay, chairman of BIOTICA, said, "Our methodology allows us to manipulate the biosynthetic pathway to produce subtle variants on the spinosad structure. Such variants can arise naturally during fermentation, but our approach allows a systematic or biocombinatorial search."
Dow AgroSciences, based in Indianapolis, Ind., manufactures pest management and biotechnology products. The company operates in more than 50 countries and has worldwide sales of more than $2 billion. Dow AgroSciences is a wholly-owned subsidiary of The Dow Chemical Company.
BIOTICA, based in Cambridge, UK, is focused on the production of novel biopharmaceuticals through targeted alteration of biosynthetic pathways leading to polyketides, a diverse class of products to which spinosad belongs. The company has already applied this technology to the pathways for a number of anti-infective and immunosuppressant compounds.