Vestaron scaling up ahead of regulatory evaluation

Date: February 1, 2010
Source: Nathan Peck

Timing is everything. The timing for growth could not be better, say officials with Vestaron Corporation, formerly Venomix Inc., as the company scales up for large scale production ahead of Food and Drug Administration approval of its first spider-venom based pesticide compound.

The technology, regulatory environment and market are ripe for the biologically derived pesticides produced by the Kalamazoo-based firm, John McIntyre, president and CEO of the agricultural biotech firm, told LabWork.

“The challenge has been to increase production and drop the cost of the product so it is competitive with current insecticides,” McIntyre said. “As of 2009, we have dropped the cost of producing a gram of the peptide within near proximity of the pricing for existing commercial insecticides.”

The 11-person firm has developed a pesticide based on peptides derived from spider venom that targets insects specifically and is harmless to humans and other animals. The problem with current chemical pesticides is insects have developed resistance to many insecticides because the chemicals target just four metabolic systems in the pests.

Unlike synthetic pesticides, which can be toxic to humans and other animals in the environment, the peptide pesticide quickly breaks down into harmless amino acids. Vestaron can avoid long-term field studies of toxicity and go through an expedited regulatory approval process with the FDA, which should take 12 to 15 months to complete. McIntyre expects to launch the product in 2012.

The company is working to develop the marketing and distribution channels within the agriculture industry. Vestaron is anticipating marketing to the high-end agriculture production, fruit trees, grapes, and nut trees. The spider venom peptide is particularly effective against chewing insects, such as caterpillars, and McIntyre believes they can take a sizable chunk of the $15 billion global insecticide market.

“We believe our product is unique and will stand clearly above the rest of the industry. Is that a tough sell, hell yes,” McIntyre said. “We are working to access markets in high-end food production. A lot of people will see our product as we go through further testing.”

Vestaron is working on closing out financing for its series B funding by the end of 2010, and McIntyre said the company is finding interest among agricultural based venture capital, but also has a committed group of current investors. Support from the Southwest Michigan First Life Sciences Fund and the state of Michigan have been key in driving series A investment in the startup since 2005.

“The thing that brings your life sciences companies to their knees is (access to) cash,” McIntyre said.

Researchers have been focused on increasing the yields of pesticides produced in the lab ahead of industrial scale production. The agricultural biotech company is working out the processes associated with producing batches of 2 liters in an incubator in their lab in the Southwest Michigan Innovation Center to batches of 750 liters for testing.

Vestaron has established a relationship with a production facility to produce the pesticide in industrial volumes of 10,000 liters or more, and hired Robert Venable as production manager to help scale up manufacture of the peptides. The company relies on the fermentation of yeast that has been genetically modified to produce and excrete the peptides, a technique developed in the pharmaceutical industry, said Robert Kennedy, VP for research.

“In order to do testing, we are ramping up our scale of production,” Kennedy said. “We are increasing the productivity of our fermentation, which has been pretty remarkable. The first hurdle was developing a novel mechanism for insecticides (and) we are now looking to other ways of using peptides.”

Vestaron is looking to new avenues to introduce the chemicals via genetically modified crops and a synthetic chemical mimic of the peptide insecticide. The company has had some success in introducing genes into plants to produce the peptide to fend off insects. A synthetic chemical pesticide would use the same target as the peptide, but because it is highly selective would be safe to humans and animals.

The approval process for synthetic insecticides is considerably longer, and McIntyre said Vestaron is looking to larger agricultural chemical companies to partner with the development of the GMO and synthetic insecticides.

Agriculture companies had looked at spider venoms 40 years ago, but spider venoms can contain several thousand peptides, some of which are toxic only to insects, others that are toxic to humans. The technology to separate out, identify and analyze the compounds was decades off, and the conventional wisdom was that the venom peptides could not be made into a viable pesticide, said Peter Carlson, Chief Scientific Officer.

“We are the beneficiaries of the tools of pharmaceutical research over the last 20 years,” Carlson said. “These have become off-the-shelf items for us. This sort of research could not be done two decades ago.”  LW

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