Roger: My guest this week is on the board of AgResearch. He’s also on the board of a newly launched plant sciences IP development company called PhytaGro. Danny Chan, welcome.

Danny: Thank you.

Roger: Danny, we know that PhytaGro is a joint venture between AgResearch and an American venture capital company called Finistere. What we don’t know a lot about is what it’s actually going to do. Can you give us the brief run down.

Danny: Joint ventures really is to launch AgResearch IPs onto the international market, and through Finistere’s connections in the US we are able to acquire or merge some of the IPs from outside with that of the AgResearch IPs and hopefully that will produce much better plant products.

Roger: Intellectual property of what kind?

Danny: Intellectual properties in these particular joint venture companies, mainly related to the plants sort of IPs.

Roger: So why the need to go offshore with this?

Danny: For several reasons, I suppose. The first one, that AgResearch has a lot of IPs developed over the years and we got to certain stage that, if we want to have a major break through, we probably need to introduce outside IPs. And secondly that we also realise that some of our IPs can be commercialised on the world-wide basis. In other words, we want to unlock the value of our IPs that we have developed over the years.

Roger: Can you give us some examples of what sort of crops this will involve?

Danny: In the past we mainly concentrated on forage, which is like the clover and the grass, but we realised that some of these IPs can be applied to other crops such as corn, cotton, rice - a whole host of other crops that we’re not growing in New Zealand. If we can commercialise some of these IPs and be applied to the other crops then there’s a huge market potential for us.

Roger: So what kind of investment is AgResearch making in this new company?

Danny: PhytaGro, so far the investment is very little, it’s under one and a half million dollars, New Zealand dollars, at the moment. And we envisage to invest maybe up to another 5 million dollars over the next few years. What happens, we have a lot of these IPs that we developed over the years, and we actually put that into the joint venture company, and I suppose that’s our contribution towards the capital.

Roger: How do you make sure that AgResearch IP isn’t used off shore to compete with New Zealand farmers?

Danny: We have a control on the IPs ourselves, ok. We’re only licensed to certain manufacturers.

Roger: Who are some of these big companies? Are we talking Monsanto, Syngenta, De Pont?

Danny: All of those companies, Merck Sharpe and Dome and so on, all these are large international chemical companies.

Roger: What would be the role of genetic engineering in this partnership?

Danny: When you talk about GM, I think all the research institutions do some degree of GM research work, but we must work within whatever the guidelines set down by a particular government, so we must follow their regulations.

Roger: Ok, you’ve talked in the press information that was delivered around this new partnership, there’s a lot of talk about access to gate keeping technology – things that will enable AgResearch to take its research to the world. How will that gate keeping technology ultimately benefit AgResearch and New Zealand?

Danny. I’ll just give you an example on the flowering cycle technology – what we’ve done over the years at AgResearch is that we have identified certain ways to control the flowering cycle of plants. So, if you apply that technology to other crops, for example like cotton, you could even produce out of season crops using that technology and by licensing or selling that technology to the international markets we could reap huge financial benefits, and that money will flow back to New Zealand and then that money will also be used for further research and development. And of course the New Zealand pastoral industry will benefit from the new crops that we develop.

Roger: So is that one of the projects that PhytaGro will be concentrating on?

Danny: Not just one – we’ve got several projects.

Roger: Can you give us an idea of what the others might be?

Danny: OK – well the other one is that we’re looking at developing salt-resistant plants, and then insecticide-resistant plants, so these are very interesting ones.

Roger: Will licenses for these technologies be granted only off-shore? Or back in New Zealand as well?

Danny: Oh, no. They’ll be granted back to New Zealand, sure. We actually kept the IPs ourselves – we’re not selling our IPs. In most cases we just license them to other people, and we still retain all the IPs in New Zealand by AgResearch.

Roger: How much of this is about chasing R&D money that’s just not available in New Zealand?

Danny: Well, we actually thought that our IPs are worth a lot more in the international market if it’s fully developed, than in New Zealand. So therefore, yes, the financial gain is a consideration.

Roger: Danny Chan, it sounds like a very interesting future – thanks for joining us.

Danny: Thank you.

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