Published by: Tal Heller
Stockton Israel has signed an agreement with the Weizmann Institute’s “Yeda” Company to develop ‘green’ products for crop protection. The R&D investment: 10 million dollars per product; the estimated revenue: tens of millions of dollars per year.
The Israeli Stockton Group, specializing in novel solutions and eco-friendly plant protection products, has signed an agreement with the Yeda Research and Development Company Ltd., the commercial arm of the Weizmann Institute of Science, for joint research with Prof. Assaf Aharoni’s Department of Plant Sciences laboratory at the Weizmann Institute of Science, Rehovot. The agreement includes an option for a royaltybearing license to develop new products.
Stockton will invest 10 million dollars in the development of each product. This development forecasts an increase in sales by tens of millions of dollars per year.
Within the framework of the agreement, Professor Aharoni and Stockton will investigate molecules from nature to develop innovative, plant-based, active ingredients for crop protection – insecticides, fungicides and bactericides.
This is a completely new type of product development using basic tools for genomic r
esearch to contribute to plant protection – an approach still in its infancy in the world. The first stage of the research studied more than 3,000 different molecules in nature. At the Weizmann Institute, these molecules are used to scan for new drugs and, in collaboration with Stockton, to find new ‘green’ products for crop protection.
This research is carried out parallel to another for which Stockton was awarded a research budget of one million euros from the European Union for the discovery of a family of molecules called triterpenoids taken from various sources, in addition for the development of new biomedical insecticides and fungicides for crop protection based on natural ingredients.
Ziv Tirosh, CEO of Stockton commented that these two agreements would greatly increase the flow of the company’s future products while extending its range of cooperation possibilities.
“The objective is both ‘greener’ crop protection and cleaner production processes,” says Ziv Tirosh, “this in the context of the industry’s overall objective to reduce the use of chemical products for crop protection “.
Stockton’s development process will last 60 months, of which approximately 36 months are to be given over to research. As a result, products protected by patents will be marketed. Some of them will be included as part of Stockton’s basket of products and some will be sold by Stockton to other companies wishing to market the products.