Highlights and Analysis from New Approaches to Herbicide and Bioherbicide Discovery Article
This week I was reading New Approaches to Herbicide and Bioherbicide Discovery and found it to be a useful overview of some of the technology out there today that aims to overcome the discovery challenges the industry has experienced. Before diving into some of my highlights and key takeaways, I wanted to look at how the industry has trended in terms of discovery by look at the AgBioInvestor Time and Cost of New Agrochemical Product Discovery, Development and Registration report to set the stage.
Index:
Overview
Cost Growing Across Discovery and Commercialization Activities
Eroom’s Law in Crop Protection
R&D Expenditure
Chemical vs. Biological
Synthetic Biology and Gene Editing for Herbicide Resistance
High-Throughput Discovery
Protein Degradation Technology
Projini’s PPI Inhibition Strategy
AI-Driven Compound Discovery
Phosphonates and Natural Product Potential
Final Thoughts
Going back to 1995, AgbioInvestor has been releasing a report overviewing the expenditures and timelines surrounding the largest agrochemical companies’ bringing new crop protection products to market.
As many would expect, the cost of bringing a new crop protection active ingredients to market continues to increase:
Source: AgBioInvestor
Over the most recent quinquennium, 2014-2019, costs to bring a new active ingredient to market went above $300 million USD for the first time.
In recent decades, the agricultural sector has encountered significant challenges with herbicide innovation. With few new modes of action (MOAs) emerging since the 1980s, weeds have developed resistance to many traditional herbicides, creating an urgent need for novel and effective solutions:
Source: AgBioInvestor
Since the 1980s, herbicides with new MOAs have rarely been developed, with only two notable additions in recent decades. This slowdown has led the industry to rely heavily on a limited selection of older molecules. Consequently, herbicide resistance has accelerated, as weeds evolve and adapt to current control measures.
Costs Growing Across Activities
The cost of all activities across the discovery and commercialization process are growing, which is why new approaches and technology are being looked at to overcome these challenges.
AgbioInvestor breaks out how those costs vary by segment of the product R&D and commercialization process:
The largest increases were in the “registration” process along with the “chemistry” and “field trials.”
Registration is indicative of the “preparation and submission of data dossiers to, and subsequent negotiations with, registration authorities to obtain approval to market a new product.”
Chemistry denotes the “scale-up of chemical synthesis to produce volumes required for product development and then for commercial introduction. Also the development of formulations suited to the target crop applications”.
The AgBioInvestor highlights increased regulatory pressure as being a key driver of moving some of the testing and costs earlier:
The 2014-19 survey results indicate a migration of toxicological and environmental chemistry costs from the developmental phase to the research phase. This likely indicates the companies’ response to increased regulatory pressure within the major crop protection markets regarding AI fate and metabolites, meaning that toxicological and environmental chemistry profiling is a more significant factor in the decision to progress an AI from the research phase into development.
Not only did costs go up, but timelines to bring new active ingredients to market crossed the 12-year mark:
This increase is indicative of more complexity in the data requirements of regulatory bodies, along with the reality that regulatory bodies are more likely to refrain from granting conditional approvals.
Eroom’s Law
Based on Eroom’s Law in Crop Protection, the concept from the pharmaceutical industry stated as: