Davis-based agricultural technology company Botanical Solution Inc. is hiring scientists for research it plans to perform locally at two agricultural coworking spaces as it develops its own local laboratories and greenhouses.
Botanical Solution has 100 employees, most of them working in laboratories in Santiago, Chile, where the company was founded in 2013.
The company doesn't have its own labs locally now, "but we will," CEO Gaston Salinas told the Business Journal.
Getting approval to build out its own labs will likely take more than a year or two, he said, so the company is standing up local research at the UC Davis-HM.Clause Life Science Innovation Center south of Davis, and it is also planning to take space in The Lab@AgStart in Woodland to begin work in the region.
Both the Life Science Innovation Center and Lab@AgStart offer shared equipment and lab space for agricultural and plant-based pharmaceutical research. Additionally, the Life Science Innovation Center offers access to greenhouse space.
The company will be hiring four or five scientific researchers locally to begin its work, said Eli Khayat, head of research and development with Botanical Solution. The plan is to have about 10 researchers in the Davis area in a few years.
The company grows and delivers extract products from the soap bark tree, or Quillaja saponaria, which are effective in crop protection. Botanical Solution has partnerships with Switzerland-based crop protection company Syngenta AG to deliver QS-21 extracts from the soap bark tree.
The local operations will research deeper into the genetics Quillaja saponaria for applications for pharmaceutical uses. The adjuvant QS-21 is used to increase efficacy of vaccines and medicines. The soap bark tree is native to Chile, and it is protected in the wild.
Botanical Solution uses indoor-raised plants as tiny biofactories to manufacture rare extracts in a patented process that allows it to control conditions and outcomes in infant plants so that rare and protected species don’t have to be harvested as adult trees.
Typical pricing for QS-21 for agricultural use is about $30 per liter. However, pharmaceutical grade QS-21 fetches more than $400,000 per gram.
The local researchers will work on robust screening tools to map the genes from Quillaja saponaria. The natural extracts have been used for years for their qualities, but the internal plant mechanisms have not been studied, Khayat said.
"Everything has to be discovered from scratch," Khayat said. "There is no genomic data."
In addition to that research, the company will work on selective slight mutations to create a library of mutations with minute expressions of desired traits, which the company can then target and amplify.
Eventually, the company will use genomic editing to create the desired traits.
That kind of research requires deep expertise and experience from researchers, and that is why the company is building out a team near the University of California Davis, which is one of the world's top agricultural universities.
In December, Botanical Solution announced a partnership agreement with British ingredients company Croda International PLC to ramp up production of its rare sustainable plant extracts that have pharmaceutical uses.
Botanical Solution manipulates and stresses its plants with precise protocols that create conditions that don’t occur in the wild. As the plant tries to defend itself, it creates the kind of compounds that the company is seeking to encourage and isolate.
Botanical Solution grows plant tissue culture indoors in controlled environments on vertical racks. Its system is essentially a clean room that allows for no contamination. The process can keep cultivation going continuously, and it allows its material to be harvested after only 60 days.
