“If you had asked me how farmers viewed the space five or six years ago, many of them had an extreme distrust of anything biological,” says BioPrime CEO Dr. Renuka Diwan. “But within five years, the situation has completely changed because products are getting better and more science-driven companies are coming in.”
That said, “many farmers still don’t have this mindset of first going to biologicals,” notes Diwan, who teamed up with Dr. Amit Shinde and Dr. Shekhar Bhosle in Maharashtra, India, in 2016 to generate a new generation of biostimulants, biofertilizers, and biofungicides.
“First they will use chemicals and then when they are frustrated and nothing works, they turn to biologicals, by which time the infection [they might be trying to treat] has become quite severe.
“So there’s still some education needed. But I think certain biologicals have become mainstays. For example, Mycorrhiza [symbiotic fungi that colonize plant roots and help absorb phosphorus and water, especially in nutrient-poor soils] and Trichoderma [fungus used as a biocontrol agent to suppress soil-borne plant pathogens and promote plant growth] have become mainstays. So they will apply these products, especially where they see soil borne diseases destroying their crops.”
BioPrime is best known for two innovations: A patented high throughput screening platform called SNIPR for biomolecule discovery, and BioNexus, a library of thousands of microbes collected from all over India with the potential to help plants tackle drought and disease.
The firm, which initially focused on the domestic market, is now expanding into international markets with upcoming launches in North America, Brazil, and Southeast Asia.
AgFunderNews (AFN) caught up with Diwan (RD) to get the lowdown on how BioPrime got started, what problems it is solving, and the challenges facing startups in India trying to raise capital.
The BioPrime team. Image credit: BioPrime
AFN: Tell us the origins story at BioPrime…
RD: All three founders come from an academic background, so we spent a lot of time in the field speaking to growers, farmers, and nurseries to understand the challenges they were facing as the yield gap in India— the difference between the potential outcome for the plant vs what the farmer actually realizes on his field—is very, very high.
And while speaking to the farmers, we learned that when there is excessive climate related change, they can lose 30-40% of their yield.
There’s so much academic research already on heat management, salinity management, and drought management, but when it comes to the field, that has not translated into products. Back in 2016 we had a really severe heat wave and a huge percentage of the tomato crop was lost, despite the fact that we’re talking about some of the most progressive farmers in the country; it was clear that chemicals cannot solve for this problem. It’s a problem that probably only biologicals can help solve.
So in 2016 we decided to focus on climate resilience to help farmers maintain yields regardless of climate fluctuation.
AFN: How are you doing things differently?
RD: We addressed the problem from a first principles approach and decided to focus on secondary metabolites and signaling molecules, which essentially differentiates us from a large number of biologicals there today.
Even with seaweed [which is widely used as a biostimulant in agriculture], we don’t ferment it. 98% of the global market is fermenting seaweed. We are extracting them [bioactives in seaweed] using approaches specific to secondary metabolites. We end up with very different outcomes because we’re looking at the problem from a very different perspective.
AFN: How do you identify promising candidates for biologicals?
RD: We realized early that [to speed up product discovery] we needed to do scaled down assays, so we could do many assays in small quantities in a rapid but reliable manner, that could be indicative, enabling us to pick our leads faster.
And that’s where high throughput screening came in. So initially, because we were developing biostimulants, the screening was for heat, salinity, and drought tolerance. So we were looking at things like cell membrane stability [how well plant cell membranes remain intact under stress], photosynthetic pigment stability [can the plant maintain photosynthesis under stress?], electrolyte leaching [high leakage indicates cell damage], and stomatal conductance [higher conductance supports better photosynthesis].
As we move towards biocontrols [which tackle pests, disease, and weeds], we are developing a new set of assays.
BioPrime plant growth chamber. Image credit: BioPrime
AFN: What kind of source materials are you working with? Plant extracts or microbes?
RD: Our approach is to look for functionality of the molecule, which can come from plants or microbes. We have a collection of plant extracts and a huge library of microbes. The more we screen, the more data we accumulate around the molecules. As the data keeps accumulating, product development becomes easier.
AFN: How does the screening process work?
RD: We’re doing scaled down physiological assays, so we’ve managed to scale things down to microtiter plates [tiny plastic plates with multiple small wells serving as mini test tubes] which can be read on the computer.
Of course, there’ll be a standard assay, but how to do that in a microtiter, how to scale it down, how to read it, what would be its functionality, developing a protocol that’s reliable and consistent… all of that is unique to us.
AFN: What else are you factoring in aside from functionality?
RD: Very early on in our problem definition, we try and understand how the product will be used, when and how it will be applied, how much will it cost to source or produce it at scale, and does it have year-round availability.
As products may contain a combination of molecules, we also have to show they can work together and validate the combination.
AFN: Are your products designed to replace synthetics or are they addressing problems for which there are no existing solutions?
RD: In the climate resilience segment, there are no synthetics that are really able to solve for this. In cases where we’re looking at yield enhancements, mostly people are using plant hormones, but there’s a lot of push for non-hormone related products. If you’re looking at nutrient use efficiency, people are already commercializing microbes.
On the plant protection side, I wouldn’t say we’re looking at replacing synthetics, rather we are looking at integrating biologicals with synthetics so that we can find a more balanced approach to disease and pest management. So it is a case of having a different functionality as well as reducing the amount of synthetic product farmers have to use.
Here, we’re looking at products that can be applied in between chemical sprays, or in future, integrated solutions featuring synthetic and biological components targeting different modes of action. The resistance build up would also be slower. I think the world is definitely going to move towards a place where synthetics and biologicals will be integrated.
BioPrime in the field. Image credit: BioPrime
AFN: How much progress have you made to date?
RD: We started with biostimulants, so we’re further along in our journey there with a good portfolio and a lot of commercial partners from Indian MNCs (multinational corporations) to global MNCs. But many plant-based biostimulants are inherently not fixing problems. Unless we work on restoring the microbiome of plants, we will always be firefighting, which is why we started working with microbes.
This was our first year of doing trial market launches of some of our [microbial] products in two geographies, and we had a tremendous response. This financial year, we’re looking at scaling that up.
We have recently launched one of our strains as a broad range biofungicide that addresses about 12 soil borne pathogens that are prevalent in the Indian market.
AFN: Can you talk in more detail about one of your innovations?
RD: In India and parts of Africa, the soil is extremely deficient in phosphorus. In these regions [with acidic soil] phosphorus binds to aluminum and iron ions in the soil [making it unavailable to plants] as opposed to everywhere else in the world where it is locked with calcium [which is easier to manage with traditional phosphorus-solubilizing microbes or fertilizers].
And so an entire biofertilizer industry was focused on developing strains which released phosphorus from calcium, but none of the products worked in India, because the soil was different.
When we looked at this, we understood that strains [being developed by biologicals companies] simply don’t work with aluminum and iron. So we developed a consortium [a group of microbes] that works across calcium, iron and aluminum across different pH ranges.
So we have PSBs [phosphate solubilizing bacteria], we have KSBs [potassium solubilizing bacteria], and MSBs [micronutrient-solubilizing bacteria] in our biofertilizer portfolio [to convert insoluble forms of phosphorus and potassium that are bound to calcium, iron, or aluminum into forms that plants can absorb].
AFN: What is your business model?
RD: We are moving towards co development. There are a couple of partners we’re working with on different products including nutrient use efficiency and biofungicides.
AFN: What is your geographical focus? And how do regulations factor into this?
RD: Regulations are evolving in India. So though we’ve generated data for all of our products, we are still yet to get our complete registrations in India. Our biofertilizers are registered. Our biofungicides, as they come, will also be registered. The pain area right now is biostimulants, because there’s a new guideline coming, so it’s kind of a work in progress.
However, our solutions are relevant globally. We’ve finished efficacy trials for a combination of seaweed and botanicals in the US [as biostimulants] for a variety of high-value fruit and vegetable crops, and we’re very close to completing our regulatory work there. We’ve initiated regulatory [work] in Brazil and we have regulatory [approvals] in some of the countries in Southeast Asia, so we are hoping that we should be able to generate some revenue there this year.
Generally it’s quicker to get biostimulants approved than biocontrol or protection products. But it depends. If I had to do a Bacillus or a Pseudomonas solution, that’s the case. But right now, we have several novel [microbial] strains that show very high potency, and if we want to commercialize them, the regulatory journey could be long, because these are novel microbes not used in agriculture before.
The pathway is always simpler for existing strains, but more difficult and uncertain for novel metabolites, microbes, and strains.
AFN: What differentiates BioPrime in the biologicals space?
RD: We’re focusing on secondary metabolites and signaling molecules. And there are just a handful of global companies that are doing that. In terms of microbes, we focusing not just on the strain, but we’ve also been able to show why some of the products out there have not worked before, such as those PSBs that didn’t work in India. Nobody had even bothered to ask why. We showed that the soil profile doesn’t enable existing solutions to work.
It’s also not enough to have a good strain in biologicals. You have to understand the many challenges for the microbes when you introduce them into the soil. They need to fight with the native soil microbiome to establish there. And unless they establish a connection with the plant, they are not of much use.
So there are three or four barriers that you need to cross before these products can actually start working. We work on the formulation side to make sure that we cross these barriers quicker and faster.
AFN: How challenging is fundraising in this space?
RD: We started with government funding via a program called BIRAC, which gives proof of concept funding for transformative biotechnology approaches. We went on to raise equity capital from Omnivore, Edaphon, and Inflexor Ventures.
But overall, funding has definitely been a challenge. A lot of our counterparts in the US and Europe have been able to raise funds just for development, without commercializing products or having to show traction. Unfortunately, that’s not how the Indian ecosystem works. But luckily we have been generating revenue for some time. It’s what has kept us alive.
The problem has been a lack of success stories in this space. When that happens, there’s automatically a kind of trust that develops. We have amazing success stories with marketplaces and fintech, we just don’t have them as yet on the biotechnology side.
Further reading:
NEW REPORT: Agrifoodtech funding in developing markets surges 63%, bucking global decline
?? Switch Bioworks: ‘Just replacing 25% of nitrogen fertilizer with biologicals at yield parity would be game changing’
Predator too? BioArmix tackles bacterial pathogens with novel ‘predatory’ biologicals
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