CHICAGO–(BUSINESS WIRE)–MicroMGx, Inc., a life sciences company dedicated to making high-throughput natural product discovery achievable, today announced an expanded agreement focused on accelerating natural products discovery with pure-play global agriculture company Corteva Agriscience. MicroMGx is expanding the use of its metabologenomics natural product discovery platform to mine fungi for new sustainable crop protection products at an industrial scale.
Through this expanded agreement, MicroMGx expects to support targeted natural products discovery at Corteva by applying its metabologenomics platform to accelerate the characterization of Corteva’s fungal biorepository and identify microorganisms that produce new substances with potentially new modes of action.
The unique metabologenomics platform integrates metabolomics, genomics, and bioinformatics to identify the novelty of new natural products from microbial strain collections and utilizes artificial intelligence for better precision and expedited discovery of natural products.
As part of this expanded agreement, MicroMGx technology platform will enable Corteva to identify strains of fungi that produce new and bioactive Natural Products which can be used as active ingredients for its portfolio of crop protection products.
Natural products are specialized molecules that are derived from natural sources such as plants and microorganisms, including fungi. Starting with the discovery of the first antibiotic, penicillin in 1941, many useful natural products have been discovered from fungi that have been used in pharmaceuticals and crop protection products.
This agreement builds on a 2018 agreement between MicroMGx and Corteva leveraging the MicroMGx platform, together with Corteva’s bacterial strain collection, to enable new natural products discovery.
“The crop protection market needs new chemistry to fuel its R&D pipelines,” said Jack Kloeber, CEO of MicroMGx. “Our platform is the first ever that can deliver new natural products at the scale required to meet that need.”
The MicroMGx metabologenomics platform was developed through a collaboration between research groups at Northwestern University’s Chemistry of Life Processes Institute and the University of Illinois’ Institute for Genomic Biology. MicroMGx is proud to be part of a Midwest collaboration to bring exciting new scientific methods to the world’s crop protection industry.
About MicroMGx
MicroMGx, Inc. is a life sciences company based in Chicago. The mission of MicroMGx is to accelerate the discovery of new chemistry from nature that can enrich and extend human life. Through MicroMGx, pharmaceutical, animal health, and agriculture companies will have easier access than ever before to new natural products to fill their discovery pipelines. MicroMGx was incorporated in 2015 and its headquarters and research facility are located at the University Technology Park at the Illinois Institute of Technology. Visit www.micromgx.com to learn more.