Two major agrochemical companies, Dow Chemical and Syngenta, have recently announced research alliances that will expand their plant-derived pharmaceutical businesses.

Two major agrochemical companies, Dow Chemical and Syngenta, have recently announced research alliances that will expand their plant-derived pharmaceutical businesses.

Dow Chemical, through its Dow Plant Biopharmaceuticals business, is forming an alliance with NOBEX, a US biotechnology company, relating to the plant-based production of a peptide to be used as an appetite suppressant. Meanwhile, Syngenta is getting together with SemBioSys, a Canadian biotechnology company, to apply SemBioSys’ oilbody technology to a number of products in its biopharmaceutical pipeline. Financial details of these alliances were not disclosed.

Dow Plant Biopharma-ceuticals’ alliance with NOBEX represents a new departure for the company, which has previously focused on expressing antibodies in plants. The peptide being developed by NOBEX is designed to treat obesity and the company anticipates that a large volume of the peptide could be required for clinical trials and eventual commercialisation, hence its interest in plant-based production.

Dow generally uses maize for the large-scale production of biopharmaceuticals, which are expressed in the seeds. However, a number of food manufacturer organisations have begun to raise concerns about the possible contamination of the food chain by biopharmaceutical-producing maize.

This is not as much of an issue for SemBioSys’ oilbody system, which can express a broad range of simple and complex proteins in the oilseeds of safflowers. The fact that oil does not mix with water also makes the protein easy to extract from other seed components.

Jon Evans