The Danforth Technology Co. (DTC), a subsidiary launched earlier this year by the Donald Danforth Plant Science Center to create startups from its campus, has established its first company.
It has launched Peptyde Bio, a startup founded by a pair of Danforth Center researchers and focused on developing natural fungicides that can protect crops from disease.
Co-founded by Danforth Center Principal Investigators Dilip Shah and Kirk Czymmek, Peptyde says it is focused on discovering and designing novel antimicrobial peptides, which are proteins that plants naturally produce and that protect them from diseases. Peptyde plans to partner with agricultural businesses that will be able to use its peptides to commercialize new fungicides that can serve as alternatives to chemical pesticides products.
“One of the advantages of this technology is it is clean, natural technology and we demonstrated that these antimicrobial peptides can be as effective as the chemicals that are used today,” said Tom Laurita, CEO of DTC and interim CEO of Peptyde.
Laurita say Peptyde is developing predictive, computational biology platform artificial intelligences to speed up its process of identifying and designing peptides that can be used as fungicides to help plants stave off diseases.
As it builds out operations, Peptyde has received investment from DTC and BioGenerator Ventures, the investment arm of local innovation hub BioSTL, as part of a pre-seed funding round. Laurita said he expects additional St. Louis investors to be part of the funding round, which the company is targeting to be $1 million to $2 million in size. Additionally, Peptyde recently was elected as one of five agtech startups for the Wells Fargo Innovation Incubator (IN²), which includes companies using the Donald Danforth Plant Science Center to advance research and development initiatives. Startups selected for IN² receive up to $250,000 in nondilutive funding for research at the Danforth Center.
Peptyde is the first venture established by DTC, which launched earlier this year and has targeted its startup development efforts specifically to technology that originates from scientists at the Danforth Center. It seeks to scout out technology early in its development and plot its potential for a commercial application. While Laurita is currently serving as Peptyde’s CEO, he said DTC doesn’t plan to manage the companies it helps launch.
“DTC does not plan to be majority owner and manager for the long term, but in the short term, we are doing that to get things started,” he said.
In addition to Laurita, Peptyde’s team includes Shah as chief science officer and Czymmek as chief technology officer. It tapped Jeffrey Mills, an assistant professor at Arizona State University who studies computational protein design, as a scientific consultant. Laurita says the startup plans to initially hire at least four Ph.D. scientists who will work full time on the development of its technology platform.
