New company aims to take NZ agbiotech to the US

AgResearch, the largest of New Zealand's crown research institutes, has formed a new company with San Diego venture capital firm Finistere Partners, to commercialise its plant genome technology in the US.

Unveiled this week at the NZBio conference in Auckland, PhytaGro has been set up to export AgResearch's intellectual property to the world's largest market for the technology, the US, and generate returns for NZ taxpayers and investors, said Finistere chairman and CEO Jerry Caulder.

Caulder, an agbiotech pioneer and a former advisor to AgResearch, said plans for PhytaGro began to develop in earnest two years ago, after Andrew West took the helm at AgResearch.

"We decided that the best way [to commercialise AgResearch technology] was to set up a portal in the US," Caulder said. "Science is borderless, but unfortunately markets are not."

Over the next three to five years, AgResearch is aiming to take several of its forage crop technologies through that portal, initially those relating to flowering and pest protection, and into non-forage crops. PhytaGro is 80 per cent owned by AgResearch, and 20 per cent by Finistere.

Caulder said one of the biggest problems facing small agbiotech organisations was freedom to operate with patents. "You need a lot of chips to trade," he said.

He said PhytaGro, which will be spearheaded through Finistere in San Diego, already had some commercial partners, he said, and expected more. The trick to getting big partners interested, Caulder said, was to "become a credible threat... and what you need to do is get two of them threatened."