From fungicides to vaccines
Botanical Solution has found a new application for its lead product that will take it into a whole new market. We spoke with CEO Gaston Salinas
The remit of Speciality Chemicals Magazine has always been to cover the application of chemicals and materials, often the same chemicals and materials, horizontally across multiple applications. Often, specific chemicals turn out to have uses that were never envisaged when they were first developed. That applies to natural as well as synthetic products.
Someone who knows that as well as anyone is Gaston Salinas, CEO of Botanical
BSI grows Quillaja Saponaria in the lab for optimal yields
Solution( BSI). The company originally came into being to develop a natural biofungicide derived from a tree from his native Chile, Quillaja Saponaria. Now the focus has broadened to include applications in pharmaceuticals, which are potentially far more lucrative.
Initial growth markets
The company itself grew out of the work of co-founder Gustavo Zúñiga. Having grown Quillaja Saponaria in the laboratory because of the difficulties in sourcing material in the wild, he discovered that his plants generated different kinds of phenolic compounds with fungicidal activity. When subjected to stress conditions such as light exposure and changed media culture composition, he was able to generate these compounds consistently in large volumes.
BSI was founded in Santiago in 2013 and moved to Davis, California, one of the major centres of biopesticide research, in 2019. Its initial product, known as Quillibrium globally and Botistrop in Chile, is an 8 % extract from tissue-cultured Quillaja Saponaria plants. At 30-60 days, these
are inoculated into bioreactor systems for rapid growth in the right conditions for the secondary metabolites with biofungicidal activity to develop.
Following years of field tests, Quillibrium was registered and is now used for the prevention and control of Botyris cinerea, Altenaria altenata, powdery mildew and sour rot. This affects many of the high-value crops that Chile and Peru export over long distances, such as blueberries, grapes and other fruits and vegetables.
Serendipity strikes
A chance conversation Salinas had with a Californian pharmaceutical CEO led to the discovery that Quillaja Saponaria also produces the vaccine adjuvant QS-21. Indeed, BSI’ s in vitro approach enables it to produce a more sustainable QS-21 than can be produced from saponin concentrates in the bark of wild-grown trees.
The timing of this discovery could hardly have been better. QS-21 sourced from the bark of Quillaja Saponaria had been studied for some 30 years, but had not been used in a commercial vaccine until 2017. The COVID-19 pandemic gave it a huge boost because Novavax used it in its COVID vaccine.
QS-21 stimulates the human immune system and has a lower toxicological profile than other saponins in the same family. It has also been used in treatments for shingles( Shingrix from GSK), respiratory syncytial virus( Arexvy, also from GSK) and malaria vaccines. However, this has been almost exclusively in blockbuster drugs, because of its high cost, up to $ 400,000 / g.
“ All Big Pharma companies with an interest in QS-21 have been waiting for a more robust supply chain to be in place before they commit to using it for vaccine development,” Salinas says. If it could be produced more economically, there would be great potential for it to be used in many other vaccines. BSI therefore signed a partnership with Croda International to scale up development and manufacture.
BSI claims that its QS-21 achieves up to 99 % purity in a market where 95 % is currently the gold standard. This has been confirmed in tests carried out in partnership with some major pharmaceutical companies. These tests also proved that the product is biochemically equivalent to traditionally sourced QS-21 and equally active biologically.
Funding for expansion
The company has recently raised $ 23 million in Series A funding and will soon start working on Series B funding. The money is being used to secure its position in both markets.
36 SPECIALITY CHEMICALS MAGAZINE ESTABLISHED 1981