The primary goal of Molagri is to solve pesticide resistance, CEO Zaky Hassan says.Sarah Wright/ Yes-and.studio/The Globe and Mail
What happens when you take biotech, used to create breakthrough innovations for medical therapies and treatments, and apply it to agriculture? If you ask Zaky Hassan, you may have an answer to global food insecurity.
Hassan, the co-founder and CEO of Molagri, says the primary goal of the Toronto-based biotech startup is to solve pesticide resistance. A major hurdle for agribusinesses is that the pesticides they use to combat swarms of hungry insects lose their effectiveness over time because insects mutate and become resistant to different killing agents.
So farmers, who globally spend some US$80 billion annually on pesticides, and US$18 billion specifically on insecticides, resort to using even more, with dire consequences for beneficial insects and the ecosystems they’re part of. “Chemical companies can’t make new pesticides fast enough to keep up with the mutating insects,” Hassan says, “and the risk is, we won’t be able to grow enough food for everybody.” So he and Min Jin, who is co-founder and chief scientific officer, decided to leverage their biology and biochemistry skills “to do something impactful for the world,” as Hassan puts it—namely, to develop an insecticide that can be updated to help farmers stay a step ahead of mutating pests while causing no harm to bees and other pollinators.
Molagri is short for “molecular agriculture,” as the mechanism underpinning the company’s invention takes place on a molecular level. By looking at the biological structure of proteins, it can design a hyper-specific payload that targets specific pests, Hassan says, keeping bees safe from harm. It helps that Jin holds the world record in pinpointing the most detail in the biological structure of a coronavirus protein, expertise Molagri has leveraged to solve, for instance, the protein structure of the honeybee, meaning they know how to avoid targeting the wrong insects.
Chemical companies can’t make new pesticides fast enough to keep up with the mutating insects, and the risk is, we won’t be able to grow enough food for everybody.
It’s this modularity that makes Molagri’s proposal promising: The target pest and the payload can be modified to respond to geographical and temporal variations and mutations. Using sequencing and surveillance data, Molagri can tweak the engineering of the virus-like particles to build packages capable of targeting different insects.
While Hassan and Jin are both PhD candidates in biochemistry at the University of Toronto, they developed Molagri outside of academia. And they had to turn to the United States for capital since they couldn’t find any pre-seed investors in Canada—a fact that rankles Hassan. “We need to do a better job supporting entrepreneurs in the deep sciences,” he says. “Risk-averse investors don’t want to help early companies, and it forces companies like ours to rely on Americans.”
Min Jin, left, and Zaky Hassan co-founded Molagri. They are aiming to create off-the-shelf products to deal with any farmer’s pest problem.Supplied
Thanks to pre-seed funding of $500,000 from Julian Capital and another $500,000 from Y Combinator—both of which are based in San Francisco—Hassan and Jin started their lab at Toronto’s MaRS Discovery District in April of this year. “We’re super new,” says Hassan, sharing that he and Jin recently completed a seed fundraising round to help beef up its headcount (Molagri now has four staffers, Hassan and Jin included). As for commercialization, Molagri’s bioinsecticides are about four years out. In theory, they could be custom-made to meet the specific needs of any given farmer’s pest problem. In real life, though, “that would involve too much time constantly going through regulatory processes,” says Hassan, referring to safety testing and regulatory approvals for each bespoke payload.
So the two protein experts are aiming to create off-the-shelf products to be used across all types and scales of farming, everywhere. At the outset, though, the first customers will be those whose need is most pressing: growers of tree nuts and fruits, including almonds and pistachios (a feast for the navel orangeworm), apples and pears (favoured by the Washington codling moth). “Because we’re so early-phase, we’ll go where the need is more acute,” says Hassan, adding that the current focus is on tree nuts. “The need for more effective pesticides is more acute for those growers because trees grow in one spot for many years, so those farmers can’t rotate their crops,” he says. “But we want to make a product for canola—a Canadian product for Canada.”
If Molagri’s evolving insecticide turns out to be as good as promised—reducing or even removing the pests that damage food crops without harming bees and other insects or contaminating soils and waterways—it will represent, as Hassan puts it, a “win-win-win” for food security, farmers and the environment.
The company is still in its infancy, but its name might be hinting at something big: If you swap the first and second vowels in Molagri, you get milagro—“miracle” in Spanish.