One of the most significant ongoing challenges for farmers is the bacterial invasion of crops, which pose an annual threat to potatoes, apples and other produce across Wisconsin.
Marcin Filutowicz, founder and president of Madison-based AmebaGone, has created products aimed at helping professionals in the agriculture industry with this exact problem. The company has developed a series of products designed to fight against the bacterial pathogen that plagues plants.
At its core, the goal behind AmebaGone’s products is to address the problems swirling around the phenomenon known as antibiotic resistance, which Filutowicz said is a worldwide problem that not only crops up in agriculture, but also is found in the areas of industry and medicine.
Mansa Shroff, who has worked with Filutowicz on AmebaGone’s innovations, said the company continues to make strides as it evolves.
“Our IP (intellectual property) thrives at the intersection of breakthrough with transformative science and sustainable research,” Shroff said. “While we push to keep the wheel of innovation running, our main focus remains to deliver scalable and affordable products to our customers.”
The startup has received funding from the National Science Foundation and the National Institutes of Health.
Filutowicz and Shroff said the overarching mission behind AmebaGone is remarkably simple. AmebaGone uses naturally occurring amoebae as drugs and disinfectants in agriculture. The company’s innovations are used to combat an antagonistic microorganism by pitting it up against a safe, benign microorganism. As such, the free-living amoeba inherently devours the harmful pathogenic bacteria.
“The idea is very, very basic,” Shroff said. “The vision is to go in the agri-space, but it has some medical applications as well.”
At this stage of AmebaGone’s upward trajectory, Filutowicz, Shroff and others within the company have targeted AmebaGone in several strategic areas, including farmers growing apples and potatoes, which are two of Wisconsin’s major crops.
Billions of pounds of apples and potatoes alone are grown across Wisconsin annually, and bacterial pathogens have been posing a threat to both products, taking bite-sized chomps out of the economy.
The seeds for AmebaGone were planted nearly a decade ago, in part with assistance from The Wisconsin Idea, a program offered through the University of Wisconsin-Madison that links higher education resources with real world solutions.
Filutowicz, a professor of bacteriology at UW-Madison, said he has a passion for finding solutions for the ongoing, ever-present antibiotic resistance issues plaguing farmers in Wisconsin and beyond.
“This is about education,” Filutowicz said. “I’m doing this to educate.”
As AmebaGone continues to grow and innovate, Shroff said she is optimistic about the prospects that lie ahead.
“It’s simple. It’s scalable. It’s accessible,” Shroff said.
