Enko was established in 2017 to apply proven pharmaceutical discovery and developmental methods to crop chemistry.
DNA encoded library (DEL) technology in the pharma industry greatly expediated new molecule discovery, mostly replacing the cumbersome high throughput screening (HTS) method, that is still used by the agrochem industry today.
Enko intends to build a pipeline of crop protection and yield enhancement products that meet the increasing safety and sustainability demands of farmers, consumers and regulators globally.
In three years, they have recorded multiple novel hits, resulting in 31 compound targets in its pipeline, with three chemistries in field trials and 16 novel modes of action. This rate of performance has outperformed the combined efforts of the agrochem industry over the same period.
Enko set out to ‘re-find’ the major commercial herbicides in the industry to prove their technology in crop protection. They did so and simultaneously found many more molecules that bind to the protein of interest, suggesting several methods that achieve the same result. They now have leads with resistance breaking functionality. They can select the most benign (regulatory), the most potent (efficacy) and the simplest (CoGs) molecules as replacements to current standards that are either failing to work well or are facing deregulation.