Public Funding for Syngenta Limited

Across the world we face growing issues of food security and nutrition. Agri-science is one of the eight great technologies where the UK can link research strength to practical application to farming practices and the food industry. This project focuses on improving outcomes in primary production, and hence food security, by using advanced technologies to facilitate efficiency benchmarking for both productivity and environmental performance. The hypothesis we will investigate is that historic data patterns can be used to support farmers’ decision making, a positive impact on global food security in a sustainable way. High resolution data measurements will be evaluated in large scale and smallholder agriculture at locations in Zambia and the UK. Syngenta, AGCO, the University of Aberystwyth and the University of Southampton are working with other academic and international development organisations to deliver the project.

Weed control is becoming increasingly difficult due to herbicide resistant weeds and restriction of herbicides due to higher regulatory demands. In cereals, herbicide resistant blackgrass is a severe problem with no good solution and weed control in minor crops, such as vegetables, is now extremely problematic as older herbicides have been de-registered. There is an urgent need to examine alternative forms of weed control to allow growers to grow crops profitably. A consortium consisting of Syngenta, Harper Adams University, the University of Manchester and G's Fresh has been assembled to undertake a project that will deliver a system which will address these issues. The planned system integrates sensors for real-time crop and weed detection, with targeted micro-droplet application of non-selective herbicides or use of low-power lasers, to create a new and sustainable weed eradication technique. The technology platform will be applicable to all weeds in all crop types and will provide a step change in weed control for UK growers and a large export opportunity.

Unilever, Syngenta and Infineum, together with STFC Daresbury and Novidec, have recognised the potential of mesoscale modelling to drive a radical change in speed of formulated product design for manufacturability and in-use performance. Although applications to both material and manufacturing process design have been demonstrated, modelling is not always on the critical path of commercial formulation development. Against a tough, highly volatile market environment, speed-to-market is critical, especially for companies that need to put on the market new products every year. Formulation-led product innovation is a key differentiator for success in competitive markets. The technical challenge is to develop predictive models that are simple and affordable yet accurate enough to enable novel product design. This will reduce the time to market and development costs of a new or reformulated product by between 50 and 80% leading to larger benefits for the UK chemical industry as a whole. Our consortium has identified the STFC Daresbury supercomputer, a major government investment into eScience infrastructure, as a key enabler.

Chemical processes catalysed with Palladium (Pd) compounds, and based on Nobel-prize winning methods, have become essential for the production of life-enhancing pharmaceuticals & chemicals. These processes underpin global manufacturing worth more than £10billion each year for pharmaceuticals alone. However, the components of the Pd-catalyst must be recovered from the reaction products through further expensive and energy-intensive processing. This project will develop a new 'Catch & Release' technology which can catch the catalyst whilst reaction products are removed, and then release it in a fully-functional active form to catalyse the next reaction. New reaction components are introduced allowing another production cycle to begin. This novel semi-continuous process will be applied initially in the pharmaceutical & agrochemical industries and then developed for other process industries, such as the emerging plastic electronics sector.

Chiral amines are important building blocks used in 40% pharmaceutical products, 20% of crop protection compounds and are high value chemical intermediates. Current synthetic methods use wasteful resolution processes. This project will improve manufacturing efficiency by developing catalytic (transfer) hydrogenation methods to make specific types of chiral amines. The project aims to develop and exploit new catalysts, to develop solid supported variants of these, and use them in novel flow reactors. This allows reduced effective loadings of the metal catalysts, efficient metal recovery and switch from batch to continuous processing. The project generates new asymmetric catalysts, opens new market opportunities for flow reactors, and fulfils high demand for chiral amines required by end user companies made using more efficient processes to lower cost, reduce waste, improve quality and availability.

Project Title: Accelerating Discovery by Mining and Visualising Integrated Chemogenomics Data Name: Mark Forster Orgaisation : Syngenta Project Description: This Syngenta and Rothamsted colaboration project, has a focus on extending the Ondex data integration toolkit by adding 'chemical intelligence' to the existing software toolkit. This will provide enhanced capabilities for chemical structure visualisation , and the ability to link together datasets of (for example) internal and external chemical structure repositories. External datasets will include public chemical bioactivity resources such as the ChEMBL resource hosted at EMBL-EBI. This will enhance the interpretation of internal chemical structure information, providing links to public information on genes and proteins, allowing chemists and biologists greater insight into the mechanisms of bioactivity. As the Ondex toolkit is available under an open source license, all enhancements will also be made freely available to the scientific community as open source. This is intended to drive the adoption and uptake of the new tools and capabilities and contribute to open innovation.

The Smart Emulsion Project is a collaborative project between Syngenta, the University of Birmingham and the National Physical Laboratory and is part funded by the Technology Strategy Board. Emulsions offer a convenient way to formulate hydrophobic active ingredients. However, typical emulsions are not often optimised in terms chemical and physical properties. The aim of the project is to develop new multifunctional, high value, formulated Smart Emulsion products. The technology to be investigated involves use of novel emulsifier molecules to control the properties of the oil/ water interface as well as working towards the generation of nanoemulsions. Novel techniques will be applied to the study of these emulsions, including atomic force and ion conductance microscopy. Potential benefits include improved formulation efficacy leading to greater crop yield through more efficient and targeted control of pests with lower environmental impact. Ultimately, success in this project will help growers around the world to meet the challenge of the future to grow more from less and surmount the rising demand for food, feed and fuel whilst preserving the natural resources of the planet.

This project will enable efficacy and environmental protection to be optimised for soil-applied pesticides, supporting rational product design and regulatory approval. Simulation models are the primary basis for regulating pesticides against EU ground- and surface-water protection standards, but the current models cannot explicitly represent plants or their roots, or the effects of formulations and formulation placement strategies. This project will create a conceptual framework for representing local pesticide concentrations in the whole soil-plant system, and will use it to produce a spatially-competent simulation model. By relating local concentrations of pesticides to product efficacy, it will be possible to use the model to rationally design better active ingredients, formulations and placement strategies. The new model will also enable the environmental benefit of advanced formulations and placement strategies to be quantified in a cost-effective way for the first time. This offers the prospect of being able to gain credit in the regulatory approval process for these technologies, offsetting the negative economic effects of evolving regulation.

The project will enable growers to produce more food with fewer inputs, through an integrated farm management strategy. This optimises the Crop Protection (CP) using a network of in-field biosensors which then interact to form a UK, and international, infrastructure. This will be combined with the dual-action disease control and crop enhancement offered by a subset of CP chemistries. Initial adoption will be for Sclerotinia in UK Oil Seed Rape (OSR) integrated with Syngenta's dual-mode Amistar chemistry. UK technology companies will manufacture the sensor nodes which then link, alongside satellite crop-usage data, into a GIS web portal accessible as a commercial service to; farmers, agronomists, government and other agri-food stakeholders.

Project partners Barrier Biotech Ltd (BB), Syngenta Ltd (SYN) and the John Innes Centre (JIC) applied for funding to develop novel nematocide products based on plant oil formulations. These formulations will target nematodes affecting arable root crops and substitute existing commercial nematicides coming off the market due to changes in the Plant Protection Products Directive (91/414/EEC). BB has extensive commercial experience with plant oils and has preliminary evidence suggesting that their patented formulations can control nematode problems within both agricultural and horticultural crops. Natural formulations provide efficacy at low concentrations; represent a minimal risk for the environment; will enhance user safety and soil sustainability and are likely to provide more durable pest control due to the complexity of chemical composition and their naturally occurring variability. The project aims to develop dossiers for CRD and/or DG SANCO registration of novel nematicide formulations which will be the foundation of the development of marketable commercial products designed to cut losses in yield, reduce wastage and costs within the supply chain and promote cost effective and secure solutions within UK agriculture. These formulations are likely to be effective against nematodes on other major agricultural crops as well such as sugar beet, tomato and cucumber.

To transfer skills in data integration and data mining, applied to business-relevant issues in product safety, particularly in the field of predictive toxicology.

Crystallisation is the most important means of purifying high value chemical products and then delivering them into forms that can be efficiently formulated. Crystal Growth Modifiers (CGM), are molecular analogues of the active ingredient co-generated in synthesis or additives incorporated into the formulation that strongly influence the crystal formation process. In-process CGM have a profound often detrimental influence on process throughput, yield and robusntness of formulations requiring strategies for their removal or moderating their effect. In contrast, control of molecular assembly using CGMs will lead to integration of manufacturing from synthesis to formulation. Rational design of novel CGM as formulation additives can enhance product performance in application and reduce development time. This project is now delivering new capability for the discovery and characterisation of molecules able to modify the crystal growth of important industrial compounds. The methodology generates face specific crystallographic, particle size and shape information. Novel 3D Crystal Stereo imaging hardware and software developed at the Institute for Process Research and Development at Leeds University has been coupled with the commercial high throughput Crystalline platform provided by Avantium. For the first time, rapid discovery of potent modifiers including early quantification of their impact on process and product performance can be made. A pre-commercial unit has been constructed and is currently being evaluated by the consortium members including Syngenta, Pfizer and Astrazeneca. It is anticipated to launch a commercialised unit in 2013. It is anticipated that the quantitive crystallisation data generated on this equipment will be used in development of modelling technques and informatics for prediction and rationalisation of crystal growth modification through the Synthonic Engineering industrial consortium project led from Leeds.

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