Industry Insights: Enko’s Jacqueline Heard on Leveraging AI and ML Technology to Find New Crop Protection Solutions
18 December 2023 Finding the few molecules that can be transformed into novel crop protection products among the billions of potential substances is a daunting task. It’s one of the many reasons it can take more than a decade and a couple hundred million dollars to bring a new solution to market. Enko Chem, Inc. uses DNA-Encoded libraries, AI and Machine Learning, and Structure-Based Design through its propriety Enkompass platform with the goal of decreasing the time and cost to bringing new crop inputs to market. The goal is to find and select the right treatments for the right targets, faster, and more effectively
“We call ourselves a crop health company because we’re trying to use pharmaceutical approaches that have been proven to really speed up the discovery of more sustainable chemistry for crop protection,” explains Jacqueline Heard, Enko Founder and CEO. AgriBusiness Global spoke with Heard to learn how the system works and when we can expect to see its offerings in the marketplace.
AgriBusiness Global: Your website talks a little bit about new ways, new ways to protect the world, new ways to support farmers, new ways to feed the world. How are you doing that?
Jacqueline Heard: It’s essentially the way in which we’ve built our technology platform. We are trying to leverage some of the technologies that are available in the human health space to try to take a more targeted approach. We feel as though you need to understand the biology and take the system into account when you’re trying to design molecules for a purpose. And our purpose is to really create solutions that will help farmers control pests and diseases in the field.
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ABG: I understand you do that through a platform that you call Enkompass. First, where does that name come from? And secondly, can you give us an overview of how it works?
JH: One of the key enablers, one of the technologies that is a key enabler of us taking a biologically focused or target focused approach is a DNA-encoded library. So Enko is named after encode, DNA barcodes on the chemistry in our libraries that encode information about how molecules are synthesized.
So, Enkompass is really the suggestion that this platform is a way to direct our discovery and more fruitful and effective ways through a technology platform that guides you to having the right attributes for the molecules for the right purpose and the right time.
ABG: I read that a lot of research and development companies have millions of things they look at in their libraries, and Enko has billions. Where did all that data come from?
JH: We partnered with a pharmaceutical company when we started Enko. Our differentiation is the fact that we focus on the biology or target-based approach to design, really precise, selective, safe chemistry. The libraries are key to be to enabling that approach. And, as you know, typically these large libraries are in the hands of the large R&D companies, and it’s very difficult for a small startup to access these chemical libraries. And so, there was a technology called D and encoded libraries that the pharmaceutical industry started developing. And it’s now pretty much a mainstay of a lot of the big drug discovery platforms.
We partnered with a pharmaceutical company to be able to use and access their technology platform to start with the discovery of new molecules in faster ways, more efficiently and better ways.
We started the company in this collaboration. We then realized that yes, it does absolutely speed up ultra-low cost very fast way of discovering better starting points, for optimization and development. We decided to internalize that platform. So now we have the DNA coded library platform internal. We have all the IP, all the ability to develop our own libraries that are tailored to agriculture.
The best part about it is that now we own the data that’s being generated, which we can use machine learning and AI over the top to be able to expedite things even further as well as dial in the attributes that that we need. For, you know, effective chemistry that’s used out in in the environment.
ABG: Traditionally, research takes a long time more than a decade often to bring a product to market. It can take hundreds of millions of dollars. Part of what you’re trying to do is compress that timeframe, and I imagine the cost.
JH: That’s exactly right. And so, really, a lot of what we’ve demonstrated so far is that relative to the incumbents we can reduce the time to get to an effective lead molecule, meaning that it has biological activity. It’s a single molecule ready to go into development in about 75% less time.
That reduces the cost to bring things to the market tremendously. We’re targeting a 9-year development cycle versus the current cycles that are 15 years now for the for the incumbents.
The second part is that the way we do our discovery is such that we can dial in safety and selectivity because we know the target. We know that the target hits a human version of the protein, or it doesn’t. And we design so it does not.
The target is present in a beneficial organism like a honeybee. We really take that into account from the get go. We only choose targets that you can develop safe chemistry, for when it comes to using it in the environment with people, on land, with fish, all of the organisms and biodiversity that you want to maintain on your farm while being very selective for the pest of interest, so that farmers can remove those things that are degrading their yield.
That’s the whole philosophy. And we believe that all of those ways of dialing in that selectivity and safety will increase the rate at which you can register molecules effectively. And so, when you think about, reducing failure rate, increasing the rate at which you can bring safe molecules forward that’s another contributor to the to the value proposition.
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ABG: Okay, I know the company hasn’t been around that long. Where are we in your process? Are we about to bring us something to market? You still have to go through the regulatory process, even if you had something that’s ready, right now.
JH: We have a few. Our leading chemistries are herbicides, and so we have a few that have gone through all of the testing and preliminary safety. So, they’re ready to go into Gop regulatory. They’ve been tested on four continents, 200 trials all over the world. We’re very excited about it. It has very good safety profile, and we really believe it is something that is differentiated and will bring resistance breaking to farmers, because resistance has been such a huge issue in the herbicide space as well as insecticides and fungicide. So, it was really targeted to be something that could be used globally for farmers around the world and row crops.
It was targeted to realize there’s a mode of action where, because of its use, resistance is developing. And so, the chemistries that are out there today are less effective. We have really dialed in being able to address that resistance for farmers as one of the key differentiating features of the molecule while being safe for growers and safe for the environment.
ABG: You’re a research company. Are you going to be selling these yourself? Or do you employ your relationship with Syngenta? How will products be brought to market?
JH: We believe that having partners that have the global footprint and distribution channel are really important for at least in the near term, getting our products to farmers. And in time we hope that we can continue to bring chemistry further and further downstream. Tools board the farm gate in order to recognize a little bit more value for the company, but also eventually become a player that can bring their own products to the market through a variety of different channels.
ABG: The company has already generated hundreds of crop protection molecules through its tech platform. How do you decide what molecules to investigate is the system able to look at multiple problems at the same time?
JH: It’s a platform-based technology. And so, we have 50 programs ongoing. We have the capacity to discover things very rapidly, and then take a strict prioritization approach to work on the things that look to be the most effective. But the whole process really starts by saying, what are the needs out there? What are the big market needs for growers? Then we look at the system and say, “Okay, if we if we could to solve this problem for a grower?”
Maybe it’s a gap in the pipelines of some of the big players in the space. What would it need to deliver on to be differentiated? Does it reduce leaching resistance, busting – all of the things that we think would make it differentiated, be able to gain share, and would be something, more sustainable, and most importantly, to bring to growers into the world. That’s how we start. We have several product concepts. And then we go and we find target biology that we think can address those specific needs of growers.
That’s where we start our process. So now we have 50 of those, which are targets by product opportunity that we are working on simultaneously. And most of the resources go to the ones that are looking to be the most successful. So, it’s just a constant stage of prioritization. Because of our throughput. Of course, we can also partner with the industry as well as bring our own molecules forward. We have collaborations with Bayer, Syngenta, and Nufarm, and we work with the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation as well.
ABG: Can you work with their research departments? If they’ve reached a certain level investigating a product, take what they’ve developed to a certain point, and incorporate it into your system, or are they not compatible that way.
JH: Our philosophy around partnering with someone on code development is the more that you can bring the scientists together and collaborate and bring, the knowledge base and the experience of people together – it’s just a win-win. We have very good relationships with our partners. And we’re very open with how we think our pipeline, or our technology platform, can improve what they do, and they in turn help us understand some of their experiences from the past that really help us, a startup company, be better at what we do. It’s really a win-win,
ABG: Your focus right now on crop protection. Over the last few years, a greater emphasis has been placed on plant health products that are not preventing or eliminating pests. Instead, they’re strengthening the plant, allowing it to use its own defenses and the surrounding microbiome to help fight pests and other stresses. Can your system work in that realm?
JH: It absolutely can. It absolutely can. And it’s one of the indications that we’ve articulated, that we’re moving forward to try to find chemistry that are more like the biostimulants, something that targets a biology in the host or the biology of soil. Microbes that will help them produce important nutrients for plants and crop agriculture. We absolutely have that you know, as a as a target for us going forward. And we think the technology platform that we have is ideally suited for it.
ABG: What else do we need to know?
JH: It’s urgent to take a look at the regulatory paradigm and the regulatory system for registering compounds. It feels like there’s never been a more urgent need to bring new solutions forward to growers. And yet the time to bring products to the market is just getting longer and not getting shorter. And some of it, I think, is not necessarily based on some of the underlying science. It’s a lack of throughput through the regulatory agencies. And so, I would love to just highlight as an urgent opportunity, the increased awareness of the importance of having a regulatory system that can effectively work through some of the backlogs and work through some of the needs of the industry to really expedite new solutions. Getting to farmers’ fields faster.
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ABG: How will the new products being developed fit into the current regulatory environment?
JH: We are fundamentally an AI data company. We see, we’re part of this digital transformation of ag, so if you have sensors that are collecting data, or if you have drones and different application technology for precision applicators, we believe that our solutions and our molecules are going to fit into that system perfectly. And if and could help even catalyze the adoption of new technologies, both in terms of application. But even supercharging biologicals. Where you have a combination of a biologic with a chemistry that can effectively reduce the environmental load of some molecules but improve the effectiveness of having integrated solutions with the idea in mind that working together is a better way to have a positive impact on growers and on the food production system.
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