How to develop a biofungicide based on a bacterial strain: the main steps for turning your discover into a plant protection product

Less than 0.1 % of the potentially bioactive microbial biocontrol agents reaches the market (estimation based on the number of active strains reported in scientific journals, ‘grey literature’ and theses available on web and the number of registered commercial products). In the last decade research efforts on microbial biocontrol increased dramatically in EU, US and Canada, but also in India, China, Africa, Central and South America. However the EU market returns a very gloomy picture with very few commercial products available for the growers, all based on ‘old’ active ingredients (some of these strains have been identified 30 years ago or even more). The ‘new entries’ are mostly new strains of the same well-known species. To explain such situation we commonly refer to the intrinsic limiting factors in their use (i.e. microbial pesticides are expected to be less effective and more inconsistent than chemicals, they need specific environmental conditions for the application, high technical skills by growers and frequent crop monitoring, etc.) or in the economics (i.e. they are more expensive than chemicals, registration costs are too high for the companies, the market is too narrow to justify investments, etc.). However most of the product development fails for other reasons: as mistakes in the selection of the right strain (both in term of technological properties and level of efficacy) or the target disease and crop (type of disease, market size, etc.), in the IP protection and in the choice of the industrial partner to scale-up the production. This ‘how to’ presentation will define some of the most important steps in the development of a bacterial biofungicide starting from the very beginning and highlights some of the most commons mistakes that prevents these products reaching the market.