Wilmington, Delaware, USA and Rehovot, Israel
March 25, 2020
Corteva Agriscience (NYSE: CTVA), a leading pure-play agriculture company, and AgPlenus, a subsidiary of Evogene Ltd., (NASDAQ: EVGN, TASE: EVGN), today announced that they have entered into a multi-year collaboration for the development of novel herbicides. The collaboration will combine Corteva’s strengths in crop protection product discovery and development with AgPlenus’ expertise in designing effective and sustainable crop protection products using predictive biology.
By leveraging their complementary expertise, Corteva and AgPlenus will address the rise of global weed resistance, created in-part by the absence of new modes of action (MoAs) for weed control over the past 30 years. Successful products resulting from the collaboration will enter a multi-billion-dollar market.
“Weed resistance presents a serious challenge for today’s farmers,” said Neal Gutterson, Senior Vice President and Chief Technology Officer, Corteva Agriscience. “So much has changed since the last MOAs were identified in the early 1990s. It’s time to find new solutions; our collaboration with AgPlenus positions us well to do that.”
Under the terms of the agreement, Corteva will apply its extensive crop protection research and development expertise, and AgPlenus will apply a robust computational platform to optimize several of AgPlenus’ chemical families. Such chemical families have already been validated for herbicidal activity and are connected to new MoAs. Corteva holds an exclusive license from AgPlenus to commercialize herbicides based on these chemical families. Additional financial terms of the collaboration were not disclosed.
Eran Kosover, AgPlenus’ CEO stated: “We are very excited with this new collaboration with Corteva Agriscience, a pioneer in the development of novel herbicides. This collaboration will focus on optimizing our leading chemical families putting us in an excellent position to pursue our target of developing novel herbicides. I am confident that AgPlenus’ unique approach in the development of herbicides, alongside Corteva Agriscience’s extensive scientific and market know-how, will lead to new and sustainable innovation in the herbicides market.”
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