The world’s population of 7.6 billion people continues to grow, reaching 8.3 billion in 2025, and nearly 10 billion by 2050. At the same time, this population, which has become accustomed to overconsumption, sees the Earth’s fossil resources exhausted after having exploited them with a level of productivity pushed to the extreme. According to the different scenarios used, world food demand is expected to increase from 40% to 68% by 2050. Even more intensive agriculture could cope with this increased demand, but this will undoubtedly lead to an overconsumption of water resources, fossil fuels, fertilizers and synthetic plant protection products to ensure high yields. The consequences of these production methods would be to aggravate pollution of ecosystems, increase greenhouse gas emissions and therefore accentuate climate change. However, people are beginning to realize that more sustainable agricultural practices are necessary to meet this global demand. Therefore, many challenges arise to answer the questions of environmental and economic sustainability and more particularly on the need to produce more food and bio-sourced energy, while preserving the environment and biodiversity. At the same time, EU regulatory legislation has withdrawn over 50 % of pesticides in the last 25 years due to their toxicological effects. Besides being highly toxic and persistent, chemical pesticides adversely affect non-target organisms and their excessive application results in increased resistance to pests. Consequently, the synthetic chemistry industry for plant protection has declined considerably, with hundreds of chemical products being removed from the market as they no longer meet the strict safety regulations. Nevertheless, the need to safeguard plants and therefore yield of agricultural. In this scenario, the use of biopesticides is being promoted due to their advantages over pesticides.
The demand for molecules of biological origin in this sector is therefore very high. A recent published report from MarketsandMarkets shows that the biopesticide market valued at $ 3 billion is expected to reach $ 6.4 billion in 2023. This growth will be driven by factors such as increased pest resistance, ban on numerous synthetic pesticides and progress in integrated pest management solutions.
LIPOFABRIK is an innovative start-up from the University of Lille, specialized in the production of biological molecules with application in the phytosanitary, food, cosmetic and medical cleaning markets. Our specialised team of researchers has developed and patented a production methodology for Mycosubtilin, a bioactive lipopeptide produced by Bacillus subtilis with demonstrated antifungal and stimulating effects in several crops. Since 2013, LIPOFABRIK holds exclusivity on this patent, focused now on its market exploitation and IP portfolio expansion. In other hand, LIPOFABRIK has also developed another different product from Bacillus subtilis which displays biostimulant activity. LIPOFABRIK aims to commercialize these two products from Bacillus subtilis: LipoMyco® as a biopesticide and PlantBoost® as a biostimulant. The first one contains mainly Mycosubtilin. The latter is a concentrated supernatant of the fermentation broth, rich in primary and secondary metabolites from Bacillus, this application was also patented by LIPOFABRIK.
This project aims to overcome the current market shortage on this kind of biomolecules, industrialising our proprietary formulation and process to be aligned with the voiced demand. We aim to increase our production 10 times and reduce cost sales 5 times. This will allow us to offer our products at a similar price than other biopesticides or biostimulant currently in the market. To reach this objective, the research carried out within the SME Instrument founding program are focused on the optimization of metabolic pathway to overproduce Mycosubtilin, on the optimization of production and purification process parameters and to scale-up the production process at an industrial scale. Upon completion, we will operate the first industrial lipopeptide production plant in Europe, providing a sustainable and cost-efficient solution for natural plant protection. Our proprietary biopesticide ingredients will be sold at a competitive price, being the only European company with capability to deliver bulk amounts, from 200-400 tons per year, of these biomolecules needed for large scale application in agriculture and gardening.
