For sixty years, Mancozeb has been the backbone of fungicide resistance management. Now it’s becoming another crop protection controversy, but Ichor Ag believes it has a much-needed solution to the problem thanks to a new class of chemistry.
Proponents see fungicides like Mancozeb as essential for protecting crops from blight, mildews, and other fungal diseases that destroy yields and impact food security. But in recent years, Mancozeb has drawn its fair share of detractors, too, leading to increased regulatory scrutiny around toxicity concerns. The European Union has already banned Mancozeb, and the US Environmental Protection Agency has proposed banning it for specific use cases for grapes and potatoes.
Ichor noted in a recent paper that even where registrations remain intact, “environmental and public perception pressures are driving a narrative that legacy chemistries should be phased out.”
The strength of Mancozeb is in its multisite mode of action, which can disrupt multiple metabolic pathways simultaneously in a pathogen. Because it hits multiple different sites, it is far more difficult for a fungus to develop resistance.
Take that multisite mode of action away, and growers are left with single-site fungicides far more prone to resistance, and which they must apply more frequently. This not only adds costs to faming operations, it increases the possibility of damage to soils, biodiversity, and other environmental elements.
Right now, the crop protection industry lacks “scalable solutions” that can both preserve the agronomic value of chemistries like Mancozeb while helping reduce total load of chemicals per hectare, says Jeff Barnes, vice president of research and development at Ichor.
How it works
Enter Ichor, whose novel class of fungicides has been in the works for about a decade. To date, says Barnes, there is “nothing like it on the market.”
Ichor’s platform is based on photodynamically active xanthene chemistry. When the compound is applied to the plant, it absorbs light and generates highly reactive oxygen species (ROS), which do the real biological damage to the pathogen.
“You get leaky membranes in the fungi, and that’s what ultimately causes death,” explains Barnes. “It also works on other areas within the fungal cell. That’s why we call it a multi-site inhibitor.”
He adds that the compound can work as a standalone product, but Ichor ultimately its value lies in being part of a mixture. This is partly because most fungicides are in mixtures nowadays, to protect active ingredients from resistance buildup. Arguably more important is that using the compound in a mixture actually makes the other ingredients more effective and thus reduces the overall amount of chemicals needed for any given application.
“That’s really the goal,” says Barnes. “Take existing compounds, improve the level of activity, help improve control of resistant fungi, extend the life of some of these other fungicide products, and generate new intellectual property.”
“It’s meant to supercharge an existing portfolio or an existing product,” adds Ichor CEO Matt Crisp. “Patent extendability, brand extendability, increased efficiency—these are really terrific value props.”
According to Ichor, combining its photodynamic fungicide platform with reduced rates of Mancozeb, growers “can achieve 99% disease control at half the Mancozeb load.”
‘A very logical path’ to exit
For investors, this novel mode of action comes at exactly the right moment. The fungicide pipeline is thin, resistance is growing, and regulators are tightening the rules.
“One of the biggest challenges in crop protection is that new disease-control chemistries are hard to discover,” notes longtime agribusiness consultant Garth Hodges.
“Ichor demonstrated field results and attributes that growers tend to value highly. In my experience, this elevates the opportunity from being interesting to being strategically important. From an investment standpoint, Ichor looked like the kind of platform that could attract competitive industry interest earlier than usual”
“If validated through continued development, the platform could be strategically relevant to virtually every major crop protection company because of the industry’s need for novel fungicide modes of action and resistance-management tools,” adds Alison Sunstrum, managing partner of NYA Ventures, which has invested in Ichor.
Collin Philip, CEO at Verdex Capital, another Ichor investor, highlights a clear exit pathway for Ichor.
“I can see the very logical path where a Bayer or Corteva, or whomever would see this as an addition to their portfolio, either via licensing or through acquisition. That’s one of the key pieces that the company has solved that a lot of startups don’t.”
“Often add something of value, not just the farmer, but also to the supply chain, and that’s usually that supply chain gap is where a lot of companies tend to stumble and fail, because they can’t get to the market and can’t get to the farmer. This has value all the way through that chain.”
‘It’s about being extremely capital efficient’
Crisp himself points to the capital efficiency of Ichor’s chemistry. “We don’t need to go out and raise $20 million to $30 million to have a shot on goal,” he says.
“It’s about being extremely capital efficient, really deliberate about what the milestones are that we have to achieve, and asking the hard questions early. All this is an opportunity to create a monetization event that has venture capital-like returns that doesn’t have to go for a billion dollars.”
Ichor currently has active trials in the US and Canada, and is planning for experimental use permit trials in Brazil in soybeans.
Thus far, the company has tested on 16 different crops, according to Barnes.
“The Ichor concept is a platform we can do a lot more with in the future,” he says. “We’ve got one lead product right now that we’re actively researching, but there’s certainly more we can do in the future with us with this new class of chemistry.”
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