Our Biologicals by Design™ platform breaks new ground

Our ability to generate biologicals for novel plant pest and disease controls is upending active ingredient discovery.

For decades, discovering a new crop protection controls for pests and diseases took years and was like finding a needle in a haystack. Instead of looking for the needle, we can create it… in just weeks.

Proteins, particularly peptides, are the key to a new generation of nature-informed, environmentally safe crop protection products. We create these “Biologicals by Design”, leading the way in generating programmable peptides at scale. These active ingredients offer specific attributes and novel modes of action that will control plant pests and diseases in a highly targeted way.

10 Times More Efficient

“Invaio’s biological design platform is 10 times more efficient than traditional chemical discovery methods at identifying a novel crop health solutions,” says Yajie Niu. “We can design for new modes of action that are targeted to a specific pest or disease and build in key characteristics that tailor the peptide for better for safety, on-farm use and even production.”

“Our research and development team screens billions of peptides in silico, which is faster, costs less and has a higher success rate than has been done before. The more we repeat the process, the better our technology becomes at it. These nature-positive solutions will be in the hands of growers by 2030.”

The platform brings together generative AI, or GenAI, deep machine learning, structure-guided design, and genome mining for anti-microbial peptides with diverse expertise and experience from Invaio’s R&D team. The team comprises a host of expert scientists including computational biologists, plant pathologists, microbiologists, formulation scientists, bio-processing engineers, protein engineers, strain engineers and synthetic biologists. Together, they bring critical insight to harness these cutting-edge technologies.

Designing for performance “plus”

Invaio’s Biologicals by Design platform features a continuous loop to design, test, learn and build a pipeline of novel active ingredients. For example, we design a peptide to not only solve a targeted need – controlling a specific pest or disease, in a specified crop and its growing environment – but also for safety, manufacturability and ease of use for farmers. AI continually improves the process to increase our success rates and reduce discovery time as well as allowing us to broaden our scope to cover more crops and crop threats.

“Finding the right control for a certain pest or disease used to be hit-and-miss. We made it a lot easier to get the hits and not the misses,” says Jahnavi Prasad, Head of Computational Biology.

 

Benefits of Biologicals by Design

Help break resistance

Pest and disease resistance to existing crop protection is a major issue for the world’s food systems. Overuse of widely used pesticides eradicates susceptible pests and diseases and leaves unsusceptible crop threats to thrive. Our novel biologicals have different modes of action and can help farmers break resistant populations.

Better for biodiversity

Non-selective agricultural chemicals are a major cause of harm to beneficial insects and wildlife. Peptides are targeted towards specific pests and reduce off-target impact.

Naturally biodegradable

Peptides naturally break down in the environment, once their job is done, meaning there is no build up in the soil. They’re better for plants and the soil microbiome.

Easy to use

In addition to designing biologicals to control pests, we wrap them in our proprietary delivery systems, enhancing their performance and reliability and ensuring they can be used as drop-in replacements for traditional chemical-based pesticides.

Breakthrough delivery increases efficacy

Pioneering a holistic crop solution is about more than finding the right active ingredient. Biological controls available to farmers today are often complicated to apply and are not always reliable in the field. Invaio has developed breakthrough delivery technologies to solve these issues: nature-derived lipid nanoparticles (NLPs) and microbe-derived particles (MDPs). Our MDP and NLP technologies are highly targeted and biodegradable, which means they also overcome residue issues related to the widespread spraying of conventional chemicals.

Trials of this holistic approach against the diamondback moth, which is resistant to chemical pesticides, show the potential. Damage to cabbage, kale, broccoli and cauliflower runs at around $4 billion a year. In trials, a protein encapsulated in our MDP delivery system performed 2- to 5-fold better than the commercial biological benchmark and was as effective as the standard chemical insecticide at Day 10, when growers typically respray to protect new plant growth.

The future of biological crop protection is bright. Invaio’s Biologicals by Design platform is set to produce a range of effective, reliable, more environmentally friendly biological replacements for chemistry a reality for growers.