Moa Technology and Corteva collaborate to accelerate discovery of novel herbicides

Moa Technology announced a multi-year R&D platform collaboration with Corteva, focused on the discovery of novel herbicide solutions. The collaboration will use Moa’s proprietary discovery platforms with Corteva’s herbicide R&D expertise to try and accelerate the identification of novel modes of action for weed control solutions.

Moa Technology is a crop-protection discovery company focused on discovering new herbicide modes of action. They spun out of Oxford University in 2017, and use a screening platform (Galaxy for mode of action, Gamma for amplifiers) that has screened hundreds of thousands of compounds and uncovered more than 80 prospective modes of action, with multiple leads now in field trials.

Moa has many partnerships, including with Nufarm, a bioherbicide development partnership with Croda, a natural-products program with NAICONS, partnerships with Gowan and Certis surrounding “amplifiers” and now this initiative with Corteva.

Corteva has many different investments and partnerships, including:

Moa has raised ~$60 million according to CB Insights with their most recent being a $44 million Series B in 2022.

When I asked Moa about more specifics surrounding the types of molecules, targets etc they said they could not comment for confidentiality reasons. Notably, the release does not emphasize “bioherbicide,” indicating this could potentially go into synthetic discovery as well.

Amplifiers

I find Moa fascinating for a few reasons, but one area that stands out is their “amplifier” technology. I think this sits nicely with the Corteva news, but Moa is interesting for reasons beyond the Corteva partnership.