Botristop is already widely used to protect crops like grapes and lettuce
‣ “ We are following two main strategies : the development of novel chemistries from native plants from Chile and other parts of the world , but also producing well-known active ingredients that are expected to be in short supply in the near future ,” Salinas says .
Pharma potential
Perhaps most importantly , over 24 fractions of saponins are present in Quillaja saponaria that have different level of adjuvant activity in both human and animal treatments , mainly vaccines . The most abundant is QS-21 , which also has a lower toxicological profile than the others . QS-21 has been studied for some 30 years . It was first used in a commercial vaccine in 2017 , with another for malaria being approved recently . Now , Novavax ’ s vaccine for COVID-19 has been developed , using QS-7 and QS-21 as adjuvants . “ More and more , QS-21 is becoming a gold standard in terms of improving the efficacy of modern vaccines ,” says Salinas . As a result , shortages of Quillaja saponaria – derived products are affecting the pharmaceutical market in the same way as the agrochemical market . In the former case , this is
particularly exacerbated by the everrising demand caused by the COVID pandemic and other pipeline drugs , plus supply limitations thanks to strict deforestation laws in Chile . “ Global macrotrends in sustainability and carbon sequestration will put under higher scrutiny the exploitation of Quillaja saponaria wild forest in Chile to produce sufficient QS-21 in the near future and attempts to produce it synthetically have always been hampered by prohibitive costs ,” says Salinas . And , because demand is racing ahead of supply , QS-21 from botanical sources is already very costly , typically $ 400,000-500,000 / gram at present . BSI entered this market space almost by accident , because it was originally intending to focus purely on agrochemicals . The opportunity was sparked by a conversation Salinas had with the CEO of a pharmaceutical producer in Silicon Valley , who asked him about sourcing QS-21 from his plants . Having no answer to this question , Salinas telephoned Zúñiga , who swiftly ran some internal tests . These found that not only could BSI produce QS-21 in virtually unlimited quantities , its in vitro approach yielded over
ten times more QS-21 in its starting materials than could be produced from traditional saponins concentrate products based on the bark of old trees . BSI is now planning to tap into the pharmaceutical market in three stages . First , it confirmed the feasibility of producing QS-21 starting materials in sufficient quantities in its lab in Chile . This year , it is moving from production at milligram-scale to gram-scale . From 2022 , it is preparing to move to kilo-scale . This will be done by working with CMOs initially to remove some of the downstream bottlenecks in GMP production . Some of its next round of finance will be dedicated to pilot production of GMP-grade materials and entering into clinical testing of them , before moving to even largerscale production . •
J j
Gaston Salinas
CEO
BOTANICAL SOLUTION , INC . gaston @ botanicalsolutions . cl www . botanicalsolutions . cl
26 SPECIALITY CHEMICALS MAGAZINE ESTABLISHED 1981