New Tool for Managing Some Orchard Pests

Tim Hammerich

News Reporter

Chemical pesticides have been very effective for decades in helping farmers manage insect pests. But the innovation of new products seems to have stagnated and some products have been regulated out of the market. Enter peptides, a new approach to manage pests with the same efficacy as chemical pesticides, but without a lot of the negative externalities. Anna Rath is the CEO of Vestaron, a company that makes peptide-based products to manage pests in greenhouses and orchards.

Rath… “There are only ever in the whole history of insecticidal chemistry, 14 nerve and muscular modes of action. They collectively account for 85% of the global insecticidal chemistry market, right? Those are the effective ways to kill a bug. It turns out those 14 nerve and muscular modes of action only actually address eight different receptors in an insect because you can bind to the same receptor at multiple different locations. Six of those receptors are the most important, so six receptors in an insect account for 80% of the global insecticidal chemistry market.”

Rath says peptides, which are short chain amino acids, are the next step in managing pests.

Rath… “We are basically re-drugging, if you will, those proven insecticidal receptors. We're simply binding to that same receptor at a different location. So it's a novel mode of action. So it won't have cross resistance. And we're doing that with safe environmentally friendly molecules.”

Learn more at vestaron.com.