AGROCHEMICALS will fuel the future generation of products ,” says Salinas .
Biopesticide potential
Biopesticides are still a very small part of the overall crop control market , Salinas agrees , but there is not much doubt about their efficacy among growers . Moreover , the world has changed a lot in the last three to five years . Farmers have fewer and fewer options , because many chemical products have been delisted , raising resistance issues .
At the same time , farmers must sometimes transport their products for anything up to 90 days . Biologicals in general play a key part in making that possible and demand continues to grow rapidly every year . And , because they leave no chemical residue , they do not fall foul of increasingly stringent regulations on maximum residue levels .
Salinas believes BSI ’ s value proposition to be unique . The vast majority of biologicals are based on microbial platforms , because they have a proven regulatory pathway to the marketplace that plant extracts currently lack . Historically a bespoke pathway had to be found for each of them and sustainability issues arose . BSI aims to find a pathway to bring more and more plant extracts to the marketplace .
“ People always worried about the value chain with raw materials from plant extracts . With our platform , the raw material is plant-free : it can be grown anywhere , it doesn ’ t take a lot of space and it is easily scalable ,” Salinas says . “ The other key factor is quality . When you source from plants , there are big challenges in standardising the raw materials . With this platform , it is easy for them to be made compliant .”
Move into pharma
Another major recent change for BSI has been a move into the pharmaceutical sector through the use of Quillaja saponaria in the vaccine adjuvant QS-21 . This had been studied for over 30 years but was first used in a commercial vaccine in 2017 . With the
The BSI team among plantlets growing to make QS-21 vaccine adjuvant
development of Novavax ’ s COVID-19 vaccine , using both QS-21 and QS-7 , another biologically active fraction of the tree , demand soared .
BSI ’ s move into pharma came about largely by chance , Salinas relates . He was presenting at a Silicon Valley networking event about the use of QS-21 in controlling botrytis , when the CEO of a pharmaceutical company approached him and asked about sourcing QS-21 from plants . At the time , he knew nothing of it , but tests by Zúñiga established that BSI ’ s in vitro approach could produce QS- 21 in practically unlimited quantities and with a ten times higher yield than in saponins concentrated from the tree bark .
Having scaled up the product , BSI has found an industrial partner in Croda International . This will make “ all the difference ”, Salinas says , because there is a very long tail of companies in need of an adjuvant to mix with an antigen to make their vaccines work . QS-21 is rarely used alone but it can add significant value to mixed systems .
In the last few years , Croda has been investing heavily to develop enabling technologies that have helped the vaccine adjuvant space to take off . It first invested in the most basic adjuvant , aluminium hydroxide , and then created a broader portfolio .
The one big challenge in this whole value chain is that it is so difficult to extract these products from their natural source sustainably , In the case of squalene , this is sharks ’ livers ; monophosphoryl-lipid A ( MPLA ) is derived from salmonella . Croda wanted to change these value chains and make them more sustainable .
There was an obvious attraction for Croda to BSI ’ s technology because it enables QS-21 to be harvested from plantlets rather than mature trees . These are only found in Chile and are increasingly rare . Likewise , Croda has developed a fermentation route to squalene and a synthetic route to MPLA .
Croda now – uniquely – has access to all the key vaccine adjuvants sustainably and in unlimited quantities . QS-21 is already used in two FDAapproved blockbuster vaccines , Shingrix for shingles and Arexvy for RSV . Looking wider , the company sees this creating a step change in the availability of vaccines , especially for use in poorer countries for less widespread diseases , such as GSK ’ s vaccine for malaria .
BSI ’ s Salinas expects to substantially improve the availability and cost of QS-21 , through the company ’ s in-lab approach to extracting a virtually unlimited supply of botanical materials from in-lab grown Quillaja saponaria trees . ●
J j
Gaston Salinas
CEO
BOTANICAL SOLUTION INC . info @ botanicalsolutions . cl www . botanical-solution . com
MAY / JUN 2024 SPECCHEMONLINE . COM
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