Nufarm has partnered with the UK's Moa to secure exclusive rights to a new mode of action herbicide

Moa Technology, an agricultural biotechnology company spun out of the University of Oxford, has signed a global agreement with Melbourne, Australia-based Nufarm Group to jointly develop and commercialize a new mode of action herbicide.

Currently, Moa has discovered several novel herbicides through its innovative biological platform and is conducting field trials in the United States, the United Kingdom, France and Spain. These new herbicides, with their unique modes of action, are expected to be the first broad-spectrum agricultural herbicides to work in a completely new way for four decades.

Through the partnership, Moa will receive upfront payments, development payments and eventually royalties, while Nufarm will receive exclusive rights to one of its products and retain the option to commercialize other compounds in the same mode of action area. The two companies are expected to jointly direct the research phase of the new chemical product over the next two years, followed by Nufarm leading the final phase of development and marketing.

Moa's CEO said the collaboration further validates its unique ability to quickly discover new modes of herbicidal action and optimize them for commercialization as drug candidates. Nufarm Group said it is transforming agriculture by providing farmers with innovative crop protection and seed solutions, and this agreement with Moa is an important milestone in their strategy to bring new modes of action herbicides to meet the challenges of resistant weeds that cost farmers billions of dollars each year.

Spun out of the University of Oxford in 2017, Moa has developed a proprietary biological platform to discover a whole new generation of synthetic and biological herbicide compounds based on new modes of action, providing farmers with safe, economical and technologically advanced solutions. Over the past three years, Moa's platform has screened more than 750,000 compounds and identified 60 promising new mode-of-action compounds, and its candidates have entered field trials after successful laboratory validation and greenhouse testing