Naprogenix Biotechnology Platform

Naprogenix technology is designed to find novel natural products by accessing the complexity of the plant genome. Plants have evolved highly complex metabolites over 3 billion years in order to protect the species against the environment including microbes and herbivorous insects. These natural products are of great potential value to mankind because we share many requirements for protective chemicals either as agrochemicals or as medicines. This value is well-known, but current methods of pharmacognosy and traditional medicine are unsuited to dealing with the bewildering variety of plant species and the complexity of their metabolomes. Naprogenix technology uses combinations of high throughput pharmacological screening and functional genomics to capitalize on similarities in metabolism between related plant species. These are used to identify and characterize novel biological activity. This is achieved at the level of the plant cell, producing economies of time and scale compared to the use of intact plants. This in turn makes the Naprogenix “Natural Products Genomics” approach competitive with the synthetic approaches of the pharmaceutical and agrochemical industries. The technology can be applied to very many commercially valuable targets. The current focus of the company is on non-toxic insecticides, CNS-acting drugs and chemotherapeutic agents.