As a spin-out of the University of Oxford Department of Plant Sciences, Moa Technology was quite a rarity – yet the technological complementary between herbicide and drug discovery and development plus the need for similar business support meant that the BioEscalator was the ideal first independent home for the company. Indeed, in parallel with the challenge of antimicrobial resistance in human healthcare, herbicide resistance provides the agricultural sector with its existential crisis.
Moa Technology was founded around the leading research of Professor Liam Dolan and postdoctoral researcher Dr Clément Champion, whose work on high-throughput screening of potential herbicides on tiny plants is the basis of the company’s GALAXY platform. GALAXY can screen for potential herbicides an order of magnitude faster than competitor systems. Hits are then validated with the company’s TARGET platform.
From BioEscalator to Series C
In a recent interview with Moa, we discussed how its novel technology is helping tackle that crisis and, in the process, disrupting a $40 billion market that has seen little innovation over the last half a century; how the BioEscalator supported its early phases of development; and how it has progressed since graduating to The Oxford Science Park in 2021. Moa Technology was one of the first companies to move into the BioEscalator during the autumn of 2018. In the six years since then, it has made significant technological and corporate progress, raising around £50 million, and is currently raising Series C financing.
BioEscalator helps the company grow
Moa Technology had a productive time at the BioEscalator. As well as continuing to develop GALAXY and TARGET (see box), it raised over £11m in Series A and Series A extension rounds. How did the BioEscalator help? The company cites the quality of the facilities, collaborative environment, business support, and the ability to share growing pains with other small companies as important factors. Group lunches were great fun, and the BioEscalator’s location was ideal for recruiting high-quality scientists. There were useful discussions and sharing of expertise with companies developing human therapeutics where technologies (such as mass spectroscopy) overlapped.
It’s cool up North
As with all BioEscalator tenants, in 2021, the time came for Moa to move on. With its continued progression, it had outgrown its space and graduated to a new home at The Oxford Science Park. Moa also established a glasshouse facility in Yorkshire for assessing its potential herbicides outside of the laboratory. (You can think of the herbicide development phases of laboratory – glasshouse – polytunnel – field trials as analogous to the stages of drug discovery and development.) Interestingly, the North of England was an ideal place for Moa’s glasshouses because of its cooler climate!
Now employing 13 people, the Yorkshire team works closely with the teams in Oxford, providing feedback on new compounds and helping Moa’s chemists optimise their properties. Other milestones since its move include a £35m Series B round in 2022, which helped it to establish the capacity to double its screening throughput.
High-tech herbicides
With huge global demand for safe and effective weed control solutions that work in different climates, soils, crops and cultures, Moa is building a portfolio of both synthetic and bioherbicidal novel herbicides. Just like developers of human therapeutics, such an endeavour requires the company to continue to innovate and build on its original IP. A 2023 Innovate UK Knowledge Transfer Partnership with the University of Loughborough has helped enrich Moa’s R&D efforts, building its capability to use AI and machine learning to speed up the discovery and validation processes.
Moa has achieved some exciting major milestones this year, with excellent results from its first set of international field trials of promising new proprietary classes of herbicide this spring, and a new commercial partnership with the Australian global agricultural company Nufarm validating the huge future potential of the company.
Moa technology has ‘fond memories’ of the BioEscalator – and we’re delighted to have played a role in helping this novel herbicide developer build its exciting business.