Dow in R&D Collaboration with Radiant on Natural Crop Protection

Posted by Jackie Pucci|3 April 2015

Dow AgroSciences and Radiant Genomics announced a research and development collaboration agreement to discover novel natural products for application in crop protection products. The collaboration combines proprietary metagenomic and engineering-biology technologies from Radiant Genomics with Dow AgroSciences’ natural products discovery and product development capabilities to deliver new products from naturally derived chemistries.

“Dow AgroSciences is an industry leader in discovering and commercializing natural and semi-synthetic crop protection products. For example, spinosad (Entrust SC Naturalyte Insect Control, Conserve SC speciality insecticide, Tracer insecticide, and Success Naturalyte Insect Control) and spinetoram (Radiant SC, Delegate WG, Exalt SC, and Endure insecticides) are two market-leading active ingredients in the spinosyns family of chemistry that are derived through fermentation and are important tools for controlling insects in many crops around the world,” Dow said.

“This collaboration will allow us to combine the expertise and capabilities within Dow AgroSciences with Radiant’s proprietary technologies to accelerate our industry-recognized natural products discovery program, building on our commitment to sustainable solutions,” said Daniel R. Kittle, Vice President of Research and Development at Dow AgroSciences.

The technology employed by Radiant Genomics will enhance Dow AgroSciences’ natural product lead generation and optimization process. Working together, the combined expertise can help to bring new crop protection products to the market sooner, Dow said.

Emeryville, California-based Radiant was founded in 2012 with the goal of integrating a range of novel technologies including large-scale sequencing, synthetic biology, bioinformatics, cloud computing, metabolic engineering, and high-throughput analytical chemistry to develop a robust industrial platform for natural product discovery, diversification, and production. Radiant Genomics utilizes this platform to develop products in numerous market categories including pharmaceuticals, agriculture, specialty chemicals, and nutraceuticals.